Does anyone use baited electric deer fencing like this?
I want to deer-proof a portion of our property that contains a vegetable patch and landscaping with azaleas which the deer seem to love munching on. Most of the lot is wooded, and deer move through at night. I thought a couple of strands of electrified wire might be less obtrusive and less hazardous to birds than 8 ft of netting
Nick
I don't have this specific product, but I do have a solar-powered charger and two wires around the vegetable garden. It is going on its
10th year of use. It keeps out groundhogs, dogs, deer, raccoons, squirrels, etc. It has no effect on birds because the circuit is completed with grounded things. I was shocked ONCE by it, and that's enough! There's a small battery in the unit that continues delivering voltage at night. I bought mine at HD for about $100--the insulators, ground, and wire were extra. No "bait" is needed.
Many people here have tried it. If you put it across a heavily traveled deer path, they will not respect it unless you reinforce it with barriers, easily visible distractors like plastic bags, and use strong posts. They know how to knock down elecric fencing and can easily jump over it. If the fence is off to the side of their path, they will respect it.
An easy way to make deer respect a barrier is to make the barrier wide. Deer jump over narrow barriers but will not make a running broad jump over wide barriers.
Not me. I have a 4 foot chainlink fence with a 4 foot upper extension around my veggie garden. It keeps the deer out! I also have a 3 foot barrier of rabbit fencing around the bottom. I find that if I put some extra bird seed out on the ground near my bird feeders, the deer are much happier with that. Sue in Mi. (zone 5)
You don't need to use baited electrified wire to keep out deer. I have two fine strands of electrified aluminum wire surrounding my yard that keeps deer out. The top wire is 3' from the ground and the second is 1' from the ground. I don't have them located in a regular path area that deer use, but I did have regular deer raids whenever flowers such as pansies, lilies, and tulips bloomed with occasional raids on shrubs (oak leaf hydrangea and azaleas comes to mind) during the winter. It took almost a year before I didn't have to make regular checks and repairs of breaks, but the breaks were not followed by the deer feasting. In this third year of the fence, I find a break that needs to be repaired every three or four months. The deer have learned than entering my yard is not a free entry feeding ground.
Deer can trained to avoid unfriendly areas.
John
Thanks for all the replies. It sounds as though the electrified wire should work pretty well, even without bait. Judging by the hoofprints and droppings, the deer mainly move along the edge of our property and make occasional detours to sample our shrubs, so all I need to do is encourage them to keep moving along.
Nick
-- myrmecodia(at)yahoo(dot)com
we live in midstate NY, out of town, with forests all around ...neighbor across the street goes to Fla each winter and simply placed a three foot high wire around all the foundation plants about two feet out from foliage ...the deer stay away ...he even did a loop around a myrtle patch forty feet long and fifteen feet wide ..they never jumped it
I have a veggie garden in the back, tried four strands of barbed wire , 7 feet high ...large deer didn't try to get thru, but the little guys wiggled thru and did damage ...now have electric run from house thru trees 100+ feet and juiced all four strands .... no more problems ... lowest strand is 1 foot off the ground and keeps the rabbits away too ( and our pet cats ...hmmmm... wonder if the tail is the last thing to see the wire?)
Stew Corman from sunny Endicott
What I have done in the past for clients is to build a two fence system. Our deer can jump at least 9 feet up and over a fence and most clients don't want a wall of fence around their property. After talking to a few Master gardeners, one suggested a two fence system. Deer do not have depth perception and they have a hard time judging the jumping distance.
What was done on at one clients house was simply to put up a 4 foot high livestock fence behind their 3 foot picket fence separated by 3 feet. Another client opted to put up 2 4 foot livestock fences separated by 3 feet. That client has elected to do small shrub plantings in this space to negate the wire fence look. For client 1, this has worked with out a flaw. For client 2, we've reduced the deer intrusions up to 90%. The deer now climb the cliffs up from their beach. A fence here is not an option due to view... so I'm still working on a different system down there.
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