For outdoor gardeners there comes a time when the seeds started indoors must make their journey out of the house. It's an exciting time because if everything has been done correctly those sprouts will zoom in the sun into proud and mature plants. Yet outside the protection of the four solid walls of the rural home unwanted visitors may arrive. Deer.

In the 1946 film, The Yearling, based on the Pulitzer Prize novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, starring Gregory Peck as Penny Baxter, Jane Wymann as Orry Baxter, and Claude Jarman Jr. as their son, Jody, the pathos that may be caused by deer is portrayed in this heart throbbing drama.

Penny Baxter settles in an inland island of backwater Florida after the War between the States with his wife Orry, and his son, Jody. Their lifestyle is homespun down to the last detail. They live off the land of the home place cut out of the woods with an ax. What they cannot grow for food they hunt.

It is on one of these hunts that Jody follows his father and his hunting dogs into the woods that the plot thickens. Penny Baxter steps over a rattlesnake and is bitten. In a panic he looks up and sees a doe with her fawn, raises his gun and shoots. He then instructs Jody to cut out the deer's liver that he uses to draw out some of the poison from the snakebite.

Once Penny Baxter is at home recovering from the snakebite Jody pleads with his father to allow him to go look for the motherless fawn. He gives permission and Jody finds the baby deer.

The Baxters only access to cash money is the crops they grow, in this case, corn and tobacco. The tobacco seeds they start indoors, but the corn is planted in the ground.

Jody makes a pet of this fawn whom he names Flag because of its white flagging tail. They become the best of friends until Jody discovers the fawn trampling the tobacco plants and eating the corn sprouts. Since this family depends upon these meager crops the damage done by this deer is devastating.

Jody tries starting the seeds again, splits rails and puts up a high fence. But the deer hops over the fence like it is nothing and munches the tender green sprouts without concern. Eventually, because the conflict escalates to the matter of survival, Jody is forced to face a reality he wishes to avoid.

Starting seeds indoors is unlike any other hobby. For some it is a hobby of necessity. Deer like tender plants and your garden is tempting. Simple things like scarecrows with dangling cans, simple as they are, can be very effective. Deer are disturbed by noise although quite enticed by your garden.