Deer fence?

[davejoseph57]

Ok, I gave up on tomatoes this year because the deer ate them, but now they are eating my squash plants. In the Winter they eat my pine trees.

[jangchub]

Get yourself deer mesh fencing. It is virtually invisible from the eye, cheap and six feet tall. You can buy it in 100 foot rolls for about 20 dollars or less. Keep it checked for birds getting hung up.

[William Wagner]

We have tomatoes that look like small pine trees. Deer coupled with ground hogs and we have the worse garden results in over 40 years.

My brother has been trapping the ground hogs which moved into our area last year. A new neighbor says his dad is good with a crossbow. This guy has moose and deer heads up on the wall.

The deer eat our phlox which I can live with but they are also grazing our Japanese maples we been propagating for over 30 years

Bill

[symplastless]

What kind of deer? The white tailed here in SE Pennsylvania are not bothering with the tomatoes. They do enjoy the apples and peaches that drop to the ground when I thin out the fruit on the fruit trees.

[Frank]

BS. Same whitetail here eat practically everything. Simple matter of deer density. In dead of winter they will eat evergreens and starve to death for lack of nutrition. Fences/electic fences are only real solution. Frank

[JoeSpareBedroom]

"approved for use right up to harvest"?

I wonder who "approved" it.

[Seahag]

We're going with Liquid Fence. My buddy bought a gallon of concentrate and a giant sprayer. The whole yard smells like limburger cheese when the wind shifts. Good thing we like stinky cheese:)

Seahag

[Eggs Zachtly]

It never comes in contact with the plants. It's a small, plastic "canister" that sits on a heavy wire stake.

[Paul E. Lehmann]

Check to see if safe for food plants. Some of the deer repellents are to be used only on non edibles. I don't know which category liquid fence fits in.

[Eggs Zachtly]

Doesn't matter. You can put it down as a border, around the bed.

[Paul E. Lehmann]

Three foot high single electric wire smeared with peanut butter probable would have sufficed.

[Stephen Henning]

Actually people use a 3-wire electric fence (the Penn State fence) and place the peanut butter on foil bait tags. It only works if you maintain the fence in winter when branches are falling on it and keep replacing the peanut butter. Once the fence gets grounded by a tree limb, the deer will be in quickly. Also, they don't work well in winter because the deer aren't grounded when they are standing on ice. Ice and snow are poor conductors, much poorer than wet soil.

The only effective deer barrier is a tall barrier fence.

[Val]

Not necessarily true. Four feet high will work just fine *IF* you use two. I lived in the mountains of NW Montana (very few people, a whole lot of deer and other critters) for years and had a huge garden that was deer proof. I had a four foot fence around the garden, then a second four foot fence 4 feet out from that. I ran surveyor's tape along the top of both for a "visual aid". Deer bounce when they run/jump and can't make the length/leap to get over both. They know this and won't try. This was taught to me by a couple of old timers who'd been doing this for years and it worked like a charm. The second year I went one step further and had a chicken coop that opened to the runway between the fences. The birds scratched and ate the bugs and weeds. When the garden grew up to a point where the chickens wouldn't destroy the new growth of veggies I'd open the inside gate and they cleaned the bugs out of there too. In the evening I'd just herd the chickens back in the coop and close the inside gate. The chickens went into the freezer in the fall so I didn't need to worry about them in the winter. A new clutch of chicks delivered in the spring kept the cycle going. If you should happen to leave one gate opened the deer will find it and leap in, I learned this the hard way.....once.

I ran an electric wire around the outside fence to keep out the bear, moose and elk. This was "bull strength", illegal inside of most city limits and even outside the limits in some places, check your local laws. I had a timer that turned it on just before sun set and off in the morning. The dogs were out during the day so they took over when the electricity was off. In the winter I didn't have it on since everything above ground was harvested and the snow covered everything anyway. Maybe the deer in Pennsylvania are different but those in Montana could jump a six foot fence and even a few Olympic class jumpers could go over 8 foot fences. I saw people's gardens with 10 & 12 foot high netting fences strung around them using bamboo and saplings for posts. Looked like hell; kept out the deer but more often than not they were trampled down by moose or elk or mowed over by bear several times during the garden season. I liked my way better, it worked. Ten years of the double 4 foot fence and never a grazer in my veggie garden.

Raccoons, squirrels, rabbits and various nocturnal garden moochers in the food chain were not a problem. There were enough wolves, coyotes and other natural predators to keep them under control.

Val

[Stephen Henning]

The reason Penn State University developed the 3-wire fence for PA is that our most vulnerable time is in winter. I raise rhododendron Christmas trees. When there is snow on the ground, the deer will eat anything that is green, like rhododendrons and conifers. The deer's first inclination is to crawl under a fence rather than jump over it. The third wire is a low wire to prevent this. The other 2 are as you describe.

Now Penn State is recommending either an 8' high woven wire deer fence or a 5 to 9-strand electric fence. They favor the 8' high woven wire fence.

Even with deer fencing we need to run a cable in the bottom of the fence and staple it to the ground with tent pegs to keep deer from crawling underneath. They will not jump unless they see a good landing area, but they will crawl under anytime and anyplace.

Our deer herd is unbelievable. When I moved here from Oregon, PA had half the area of OR but twice the deer herd. That number has risen greatly since then (1962). Deer live on the edge of the forest and PA is a patchwork of forests and fields. We have many chains of forested "mountains" that run diagonally across the state. In between these chains of mountains are farmed valleys. The deer pressure is measured by the height of the browse line. When you drive around here all green material is browsed up to a well defined line, the browse line. The more deer, the higher the browse line. We have a problem with spice bush now, a native plant that deer won't touch. It is becoming an invasive weed because the deer eat everything else.

In New Zealand they farm deer for meat. They get by with a 6-foot fence. The deer have forgotten their wild instincts and don't try to jump it. I wish that was true here and the deer were inside fences.

[Val]

Yes Steve, I know, I've visited friends in Pa. and the damned deer were a traffic hazard as well as a totally invasive nuisance, IMO. I had run boards around the bottom of the outside fence lines and secured the fencing to that, mostly to keep chickens in, not deer out. I'd never personally heard of deer burrowing under fences around where I lived. Plus the fact that our deer were still wild in that any movement or human presence would send them running for deep cover. I saw her next door neighbor toss firecrackers out into his yard and they just sort of wandered off a bit and were back within moments, others paid no attention at all and kept right on munching the shrubs. Their natural response of fright/flight was gone. I had other advantages that living in your area doesn't. Plenty of natural predators (wolves, bear, mountain lions, etc) are a huge advantage (contrary to popular belief, hunting didn't effect the population all that much) and an enormity ( think Carl Sagan saying, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of square acres) of unpopulated areas for their dining and dancing pleasure, although wild animals aren't any different from the rest of us in that they go to eat whatever is tasty and/or most easily acquired such as conveniently planted food gardens and expensive landscaping.

After seeing the deer wandering around in your neighborhoods at all times of the day and night, wrecking havoc where ever they wandered, I was dumbfounded. People would never put up with that if they were packs of stray dogs........obviously too many Disney freaks around there watching reruns of Bambi instead of looking into effective wildlife management. *sigh*

Val