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Gardeners trying to outsmart moose -- especially this time of year when moose cows are nursing and seem to have an insatiable appetite -- tend to agree: moose eat everything.

When asked what people can plant to keep the moose away, Marion Nelson, founder of the Central Peninsula Gardening Club, said, "Some people say first plant a fence; then go from there."

Tom Jahns, the Alaska pest management program coordinator at the Cooperative Extension Service on Kalifornsky Beach Road, said moose "are our biggest pest."

"They'll sample nearly anything," Jahns said.

A list of what moose eat, compiled by Lyle Renecker and Charles Schwartz for the book Ecology and Management of the North American Moose, in fact names just about every wild plant except spruce trees growing in people's yards in the central Kenai Peninsula.

The list of trees and shrubs includes red elderberry, high bush cranberry, alder, birch, lowbush cranberry, wild rose, red raspberry, Greene mountain ash, quaking aspen, cottonwood, 13 types of willow and currants.

Also on the list are Nootka lupine, fireweed and red-willow herb, the ferns woodfern, pondweed, cloudberry and burreed as well as horsetail, mushrooms, grasses and sedges.

One Sterling resident recently witnessed a curious moose calf nosing up to her front yard planter freshly planted with marigolds, pansies and petunias.

As if summoning its browsing mom to the dessert tray, the calf sniffed several times at the big, bright yellow marigold blooms. In a flash, the cow was there, first eradicating all but the nubs of the pansy plants and gobbling three or four of the tennis ball-size marigold flowers before yanking the entire plant out of the dirt. The petunias, oddly, escaped unscathed.

A neighbor across the street accused a moose of devouring a blue spruce tree the homeowner planted as a memorial to a pet that was run down last year and killed by a reckless four-wheeler.

It's no wonder moose seem ready to eat anything and everything -- the Alaska Moose Federation says in order to stay healthy, a moose must eat 40 pounds of browse daily. Another listed fact is that a moose stomach can hold up to 112 pounds of food at one time. That's a lot of marigolds.

Nelson said she once attended a gardening symposium and happened into a workshop presentation by an Anchorage gardener who had traveled all around the city photographing the vast variety of implements, fences and borders people had used in their attempts to keep their gardens and flower beds free of moose.

"She has taken the shiniest whirligigs she can find -- not the colored ones; the silver and gold ones -- and mounted them on 5- to 6-foot stakes," Nelson said. "She had at least a dozen."

The key, she said, is to break the pattern of the mother moose.

"Some people us motion-activated sprinklers," she said.

Asked about the apparent dislike for petunias displayed by the moose that didn't balk at devouring marigolds and pansies, Nelson said, "Petunias have a strong fragrance and they are a little sticky."

She described boxwood shrubs and apple trees as "caviar" to moose and said, in order to protect those types of plants around the yard, cages must be built around them.

Jahns said he has even seen moose occasionally get into flowering plants in hanging baskets.

"The only thing that will guarantee they stay away is an 8-foot fence," Jahns said.

Phil Hermanek can be reached at phillip.hermanek@peninsulaclarion.com.