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Bambi, lovely and peaceful... Your child loves the movie. You hate Bambi in your garden. That adorable, gentle animal can decimate your valuable plants, flowers, shrubs and trees in a single night or afternoon.
There are only a few ways to fight the incursion of deer in your garden. This article discusses only organic measures.
There are basically three ways to deal with deer in your garden: planning, fencing and deterring.
Planning involves planting only plants which deer do not like to eat. There are some attractive plants in this category, so this might be the right solution, but of course, it all depends on how hungry the deer is. In the winter, when deer are very hungry, nothing but fencing may protect your tender tree trunks. According to Elizabeth Coleman of Organic Gardening Magazine deer don’t like columbine, beebalm and daffodils for flowers, oleander, juniper for shrubs and pine and spruce for trees.
The bad news about fencing is that it can be very expensive to build a fence that is effective against deer. Deer are notable jumpers and can easily clear fences up to six feet tall. Your fence will have to be eight to ten feet tall to be of any use. Of course, fences like this are impractical for all but small spaces and this is not the height of fencing commonly sold at your local home center, so you have to buy it from a fencer. Not cheap.
There is one thing that is possible with fencing though, a fence that does not go far up, but is wide. Deer hate to jump distances. They like straight up and straight down, but tend to fear the long distance jump. There are professional companies which install these “wide fences.”
Some gardeners have achieved success by laying chicken wire on the ground about six feet wide around the perimeter of the garden. The deer’s hooves get stuck in the loops of the wire and they refuse to walk across it. However, this can cause problems with mowing equipment, so it might be appropriate to make this space a semi-wild greenspace for beneficial insects or cover crops.
The final way to keep deer out of your garden is to use a repellent. There are many things which are known to repel deer. Human hair (or anything that smells of people) is one thing and may be cheaply obtained from a local hairdresser or barber. Wettable sulfur, an organic disease control available at gardening centers, can be placed on young plants to make them taste bad. Slivers of soap hung at strategic places in the garden have also been shown to have some efficacy against deer. It is also noted that predator urine, including human urine, is an effective repellent.
How ever you choose to keep deer out of your garden, there is one sobering piece of information you must face: everywhere, deer, their habits and what will repel them are different. You may find yourself trying various strategies, or combinations of fencing, deterrent or planning to achieve a balance between your needs and the deer’s.
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