How to Protect Your Garden from Deer

Some neighbors are easier to deal with than others. Do your neighbors hop the fence and pick your fruits and vegetables? If your neighbors have four feet and fur coats, they might. Deer, for instance. What's a gardener to do? Robert Frost's poem says, "Good fences make good neighbors". That's a start.

Barriers

Deer Fencing Deer are skilled jumpers, so a fence needs to be at least 7 feet tall to stop them.* Our Deer Fencing is 7.5 feet tall, and made of durable, black plastic mesh in 2 inch squares. Easy to work with, you just use zip-ties to attach the fencing to supports. Although deer are best known for jumping fences, they're even more likely to crawl under or squeeze around the edge of a fence, so make sure your fence touches the ground and completely encloses your garden. In our video, Tricia shows how to protect young fruit trees by building them their own fences until their primary branches are 5 to 7 feet off the ground, and too high for the deer to reach.

Tree Guards Have you ever seen rub marks on your tree trunks? Or had young trees pushed over by deer? Bucks rub against small trees and large shrubs to scrape the "velvet" off their antlers when the velvet dries up in late August or September. Our Tree Guards keep the bucks from contacting the trunks of your young trees. Bucks lose their antlers annually in January and February, so the velvet-removal process happens every summer.

Make Your Garden Unpleasant

Scare Tactics Startle the deer and they will seek a more peaceful cafeteria. Keep the deer guessing when you place Electronic Deer Repellent stakes in the yard. The deer sniff the acorn-scented top, get a tiny shock, and move on. Shifting the locations of the stakes makes your whole yard seem like a spooky place.

Yucky Flavors You wouldn't want to taste the ingredients in our Liquid Fence Deer and Rabbit Repellent either (unless you really like garlic and rotten eggs). This is the only Liquid Fence product approved for use on edible plants. Another effective repellent is the Plantskydd Rabbit & Small Animal Repellent. With both these products, follow the directions about initial applications and note if you need to apply again after heavy rains or heavy overhead watering. The smell will be gone almost immediately to our poor human noses, but the nose of a deer will still be insulted when we can no longer detect an aroma. With all these tricks up your sleeve, you no longer have to put up with rude neighbors who want to raid your garden. Tell those deer, scat. And you won't see that any more.

*An intrepid deer can sometimes clear a 7 foot fence, so be sure you have an easy way to open the fenced area in case you have to shoo out a deer.