I use both putrid and fresh eggs- both work. Deer Away was the most effective commercial repellent I know of before PlantSkyd came around. It doesn’t smell bad and is made of inedible egg solids. It is used a lot in the forestry industry.
Apparently, deer tend to be devoted vegans, even often when hungry.
I used to alternate between Deer Off and Deer Out on some ornamental shrubs and flowers. Deer will get used to any single repellent, so switching them up every few weeks is a good idea.
That said, for fruit trees…I don’t mess around, I use 5’ cement wire cages and 36" aluminum window screen on the trunks.
I hate cement wire- too stiff and hurts my fingers to get into the cages. I construct tree rings with 10’ length, 14 gauge, 5’ tall relatively cheap galvanized fencing when a tree is not tall enough to escape lethal damage in installations I make on other properties. One stake is usually all that is needed to hold the rings up, and you can open and close them by bending just three strands of wire, at bottom, middle and top to make access easy. Very hungry deer will sometimes push the wire in without 3 stakes, but that is exceedingly rare with our white tail deer in the northeast. Usually they do it only for most desirable species or varieties, even in the rare cases they actually do it.
Once trees have adequate canopy above the browse line I remove fencing and use a small cylinder of it to create buck rub resistance. Only 3’ height is required to prevent white tail trunk rubbing- at least in my area.
I used to use that type of wire too, but since the cement wire is around half the price and holds up better…I use it instead. The welded galvanized fencing is definitely easier to work with, no doubt about that.
I use one t-stake and one plastic tent stake to hold cages in place. Works very well.
I assume you also possess a better wire cutter than I do- that stuff is brutal. There was some sitting around at a site I was pruning the other day where some trunks were getting rubbed and I had to use a damn hack saw to get through the stuff and quickly protect the trunks.
Sometimes at night my dog will alarm bark and then bark as she chases whatever it was down over the hill. She will return to the yard and do some more barking I think just to let stuff know it is her yard.
Mini bolt cutter…makes cutting that cement wire feel like cutting butter. Right tool for the job, makes the job really easy
Thanks for the tip. I have one somewhere.
One thing about tree ring fences I have observed is that the deer will learn to use them as a prop for their front legs to reach to higher branches. Bastards!
Nobody has mentioned motion detection sprinklers. That is my main protection and we have intense deer pressure. If the sprinklers are well-maintained I do pretty good, but they need monitoring all summer long to check on hoses, batteries, functionality, etc. You also need enough to cover all their entry spots and/or plants.
I use Plantskydd as my backup, I mix it super thick and flick blobs on leaves with a big paint brush. The blobs are much more rainfast, they are thick and take a lot more rain to wash off.
Here, deer do that at some sites and not at others. but they don’t need the fence- if it isn’t there they will use the tree itself. I suspect the bucks are more prone to get up on their hind legs to forage than does, if only because it seems more common at sites where less hunting is done and I see a lot of big old bucks. In general, the deer are usually more interested in foliage than fruit in my neck of the woods, at least until fall. Anyway, the fencing is primarily used to protect foliage and give a chance for the trees to get large and tall enough to withstand deer. Where the deer go up over 6’ to pillage crops, you are going to either need much wider rings or a fence around the entire orchard. With individual trees the wider rings require less height than the fencing needed to protect an entire orchard. Deer won’t leap into a confined space. .
@alan a cheapie bolt cutter (18" or so) makes cutting the cement wire easy. Also works well on other types of wire fencing. And it’s not too heavy or bulky to keep in the truck…
I didn’t actually look into using cement mesh/wire. Pricing out plastic deer fence along with frames to support the flimsy mesh were out of this years range.
If they are real gentle ( I’m thinking like goats) I wonder if a hot wire might work, sorry if someone has mentioned this further up
I read through most of this but not real close… Did anyone mention a double electric fence (Gallagher)?
I use concrete wire combined with aluminum window screen with good luck.
Reviving this thread of a few months ago…
I never explicitly thought about this for deer protection, but I would always hit the areas they munched on with my Surround spray. But, it didn’t always have sulphur in it, and it didn’t always work. This spring so far I have put sulphur in every tank with Surround, and I am hitting their favorite munchies as I walk by. You guessed it, little deer damage overall and absolute zero on the sulphur-sprayed plants. The sulphur also lasts a long time, it is mixed in with the Surround dust which takes a long time to flake off. Another thing I recall is my deer damage always is worse later in summer, but when it gets hot I stop spraying sulphur and that could be a reason why the deer are bigger problems then.
Sulphur is definitely on the official deterrents list, and one reason why eggs and garlic are considered good deterrents is the sulphur in them. Usually I alternate oil with sulphur in my Surround sprays in the spring, the oil doing a good job on aphids and the like, but this year I am going to go 100% with sulphur. This year I am having fewer aphid problems, my ladybug population is very high early this year perhaps due to the mild winter. Every time I find some curled leaves and check for aphids to crush they have all already been eaten.
While I am posting on deer repelling, one other thing I did was to add more of the motion detector sprinklers. I now have my yard completely encircled, there is no easy way to get in. So I am sure this is also helping, but there some spots on the perimeter that are not protected by sprinklers and those are not getting any damage either now.
After reading this study, I use Bobbex. http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1197&context=hwi
Bobbex outperformed all other repellents tested (plantskydd, Deer Off, etc) by a wide margin. Since I’ve been using it, deer won’t eat the foliage once it’s sprayed with Bobbex, but they will eat any new growth that emerges unsprayed.
I spray it at lower rates and more often to protect new growth. One supposed disadvantage is that the directions say to try to avoid spraying the fruit because of taste, but I do (on apples) and haven’t noticed any off flavor. I do allow some time before harvesting.
I’m still in the process of building a deer fence (been going on for years now). Just like any deer repellent, Bobbex is expensive. I buy it in 5 gal buckets.
It never clogs a sprayer unless you let it sit in the sprayer for months (done that before).
Thanks Olpea, I will try that out for when the deer bust through (they always do at some point every year). I have been using Plantskydd which works great but I can’t mix that in my spray tank so its harder to apply.
BTW that study is not good, they take literally what the manufacturers put on the label. Plantskydd says it will last a very long time so they sprayed it only a couple times in a whole year. The two that did the best were not coincidentally the two that recommended to be sprayed every other week on the label.
You’re right Scott. I totally missed that. The study seemed so well designed in other ways, I assumed they would have used the same number of applications. The way they conducted the study it has no practical application for the user. Completely meaningless.
Still I’ve had very good results with Bobbex, but have no other reference to compare it to (other than untreated control).
My garden is only 50’ from my house and 800 sq ft so I bought a Swann Driveway Alert which picks up heat temp changes. It’s wireless and run on batteries and I have the alarm in my house which goes off when a cat, squirrel, rabbit or deer walks in front of it, lately a nice size doe which has woke me up several time in the last month which I just tap on the window and she runs off. It also serves as a home security which is nice. I took the white plastic piece out of the unit outside to make it pick up a wider area about 45 degree angle, I also put a cover over the top and put tape over the edges to make it rain proof.
