An Iowa Garden

There are times anymore where I feel like our garden is considered the local critters' lounge. We've always had problems with the occasional deer wandering in if I forget and leave a gate open when I go into the house to look in the kitchen cupboard to see if there is a new box of Cheetos that needs opening. However, over the years the resident deer have gotten bolder (probably partly because they've figured out that me asking them just what they think they are doing munching my hostas, isn't really painful), so that now I can be standing on a garden path ten feet from an open gate, and they'll run right in front of me into the garden, then lay down and hide behind a bush, hoping I'll give up looking for them and let them stay. Early this morning, with the mist still drifting up from the pond below, I was placidly eating my breakfast while looking out the large windows, when a doe and her fawn came ambling up the front garden pathway. I ran out, and saw they had just walked in through a wide open wooden gate (there are five gates into the garden). After shooing the deer out, which loped off through the woods, the doe still chewing on a hosta leaf, I looked around and soon saw how the gate had been opened... there had obviously been a racoon garden party last night, with the bark on the pathways and on the flower beds looking like a small bulldozer had run around, where they had been digging for worms and centipedes. When the racoons came into the garden, they'd climbed over the gate in question, and in the process had snapped open the latch.
Well, I'm not going anywhere, the critters aren't going anywhere... I guess I might as well get a new set of drink coasters for the garden.