Deterring Deer - Part 1

Created on 8/19/2009

It’s the time of year when the garden is overflowing with produce. The tomatoes are heavy on the vine (unless you live in our area where 45 degree nights are hampering production), and everything needs picked. Unfortunately, the deer know this as well as anyone.

I’ve had them take bites out of tomatoes, stomp on pumpkins and eat their innards, and chew zucchini to pieces. This year, they’re jumping over several fences to give our young apple trees an unwanted pruning. If this keeps up, they’re going to stay dwarfed for the next 20 years!

It’s frustrating enough to make a person take extreme measures. Years and years ago, a friend picked me up at the airport when I came home on the midnight flight from filming in Denali. When we got to her place, she decided to check the garden just to see if the deer were there. Sure enough, we saw at least a half-dozen pairs of eyes shining back at us. After battling them all summer, she snapped.

It’s a good thing the wheat was already harvested because she tore after them in the field that paralleled her expansive vegetable and flower garden. We didn’t come close to catching them, which was probably a good thing, but they certainly were surprised! The next morning her husband asked why there was straw hanging from the back bumper of the truck. We did a great job of playing dumb, and I'm still not sure if he knows what we did.

There are many ways to dissuade deer from eating the garden. One course of action is using repellents to make the vegetables, flowers or trees less appealing. The thought is to make it smell like a predator, or at least seem “off.”

Popular choices are eggs mixed with water – usually a dozen eggs added to a gallon of water. The concoction is sprinkled or sprayed on plants. Some people add cayenne pepper or garlic cloves to the mix. This can’t be used on anything edible, though, since raw eggs sitting in the sun are definitely not a good combination on something you're going to eat. I’ve used this on tulips in the spring with good success. The only caveat is it needs to be replenished after a rain or overhead watering.

One of my favorite commercial deer repellents for large areas is Plant Skydd. It’s a blood meal base that is mixed with water in a hand sprayer, and applied to plants or trees. Once again, you shouldn’t use this on fruits, vegetables or herbs. The drawback of Plant Skydd is it’s messy. The powder has to be mixed carefully with water (and I make a mess at everything I do), and any clumps left in the slurry can clog sprayers. But, it works so well and lasts for several months even in the rain, that I’ve used it for years when I planted aspens and other trees deer and elk like to munch on in the spring and fall.

There are many more options for repellents and ways to prevent deer from ruining your late season garden or stressing trees – either by eating off tender branches or thrashing them during the rut – which is why I’m going to make it the main focus of this column for a few more weeks. It takes a big bag of tricks to keep up with these critters!