Battling Deer – Part 1
A group of deer browsing in the garden
I’ve been battling increasing numbers of deer in my landscape in recent years. Deer are creatures of habit, and will continue to browse in gardens that have provided a good meal in the past. Why not eat at the tasty Trusty Garden Buffet, with its terrific variety of tempting tidbits?
I often see the deer in the garden in the early morning and evening hours. More often, I just find signs that they have paid a visit. Deer jerk and tear leaves, stems, and twigs as they eat, leaving jagged edges behind. Smaller plants may be partially or totally pulled out of the ground. This happens frequently in my strawberry bed!
In the fall, young male deer rub their newly formed antlers against the trunks and lower limbs of trees. This can strip branches and large pieces of bark from the tree. My neighbor recently had this type of damage to her new Spring Grove arborvitae. There’s no special treatment for this– you must wait and see if the tree will heal come spring.
So what can you do? The foolproof way to keep deer out is fencing with a woven–wire fence at least eight feet tall. This works well in rural areas or in city gardens surrounded by forest, where you can tack the fence up to the trees. It’s a bit of an eyesore in a wide-open garden like mine, and I believe it’s against our neighborhood covenants, too.
A shorter electric fence with strands every 6 to 9 inches is effective when baited with foil strips smeared with peanut butter. The deer are attracted to the peanut butter and get zapped when they take a lick. Ouch!
- One of nine Wireless Deer Fence posts that I roatate around my gardens.
A similar solution is the Wireless Deer Fence. These stakes use scent pellets to attract deer to the electrodes on top, which convey a battery-powered shock as the deer touch them. As with an electric fence, the shocked deer will remember their bad experience and eat somewhere else for a while.
The Wireless Deer Fence works well if you have a sufficient number of posts, and if the posts are kept loaded with fresh attractant and moved around occasionally. That’s my problem. I’m going to start putting an entry on my calendar to make sure it gets done monthly. I always warn my students and garden visitors to avoid the posts, or they may remember their garden tour as a shocking experience!
I occasionally put a “cage” around particularly susceptible young plants to protect them. Floating polyester row cover is another exclusion material, which I use in the vegetable garden to reduce damage from both animal pests and insects.
As a scare device, sprinklers with motion detectors have proven to work against deer, raccoons, rabbits, and neighborhood cats and dogs. The ScareCrow attaches to a garden hose. When it detects an intruder’s movement it sprays a 3 second burst of water. Apparently, deer aren’t too keen on being wet and don’t come back right away. My neighbor has used this method with some success.
The best non-fence solution may be a dog. Studies have found that dogs kept inside deer-plagued property lines by an invisible fencing system are a very effective deterrent.
Next time, I’ll blog about commercial and homemade animal repellants.
Happy Gardening!
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