Is Nasturtium deer resistant?

Leaves, flowers and green seed pods are all edible with a sharp peppery bite. Grow it hard: rich soil gives you a mound of leaves and almost no flowers. Blackfly congregate on the stems, which some gardeners exploit deliberately to draw aphids away from beans.

Do deer eat nasturtiums?

Sometimes, and seldom badly. Rutgers rates Tropaeolum majus Seldom Severely Damaged, B, Iowa State lists it in the second tier, and NC State lists deer among what it resists with drought, poor soil and insect pests. The leaf and flower are peppery with the same mustard oils as watercress, which is the defense, and a soft, watery annual sprawling at ground level in July is still the kind of thing a deer samples. The flowers go first.

Where it grows

An annual everywhere, NC State giving zones 2a through 11b, 1 foot for the bush forms and up to 10 for the climbers, full sun or partial shade, flowering spring to frost. Poor soil is the whole trick; fed, it makes leaves. NC State's one listed pest is the aphid, "found on flowers and foliage," which is the blackfly some gardeners plant it to draw.

Protecting nasturtiums

A plant this cheap is not worth spraying, and the 20 percent egg spray Colorado State rates High is the wrong thing on a flower grown for the salad bowl. Sow more.

If it is browsed

It branches below the bite and flowers again within weeks; a trailing nasturtium browsed at one end grows on from the other. It is over at the first frost either way.