Seaford Emergency Survival Website in Seaford Delaware - We must learn to take care of ourselves

The Deer are in the Garden

By Joseph Parish

How often have you glanced out your backdoor only to catch a glimpse of a deer happily devouring your favorite tomato plants? It has happened to me in the past and it may happen to you now. Picture some over-weight, middle age man leaping out his backdoor to chase away some hungry deer and you have a picture of me doing the shoo-deer chase!

There are so many various remedies and potential solutions to this problem that it would take a book to merely list them all. It seems like every area of the country has there own particular types of deer repellents which they claim are better then the previous one. I will attempt to introduce you to a few of the concepts for ridding your garden of these four legged appetites.

One of the oldest of the remedies is the use of dried blood being dressed around the plants themselves. Another claim to deer repellent fame is the use of hair in the garden area. Mesh filled sacks of human hair was found to be 34 percent effective in ridding the garden of deer. This hair can be collected free at any beauty shop or barber. Try to get “Dirty Hair” as opposed to hair which had previously been shampooed and cleaned.

A few people have claimed that they have gotten extremely good results from various types of commercial repellents. Unfortunately as we have previously stated there are an abundance of repellents and their actual effects seem to vary from one area of the country to another.

You can find what is known as contact repellents which are applied directly to the plants themselves. These types generally cause the plants to be very distasteful to the deer. A few of the repellents are applied to the general garden area and chase the deer off by their extremely foul smell. During a past test conducted in the Connecticut area there were 6 different deer repellents tested and evaluated. Here are the results:

The Big Game Repellents such as “Deer Away” was approximately 45 percent effective. Deer away is made from putrescent whole egg solids. In a nutshell, it is rotten eggs. Another entry known as “Hinder” had a 44 percent effectiveness. The major content of this repellent is ammonium soaps. Thiram was third with a 43 percent rating. This product is a bitter tasting fungicide.

The Magic Circle repellent has an active ingredient of bone tar oil. It is used by soaking up the oil onto small burlap slices. Its effectiveness was a mere 18 percent. Next in line was the Miller Hot Sauce which naturally contained a solution of capsicum the extract obtained from hot peppers. The hot sauce was only 15 percent effective to repelling the deer.

A recent introduction to the field was the product Repellex. Repellex comes in several distinct forms. The first is a liquid which is simply sprayed onto the foliage while the other is a dry product. The added benefit of the dry product is that it provides a 14-2-2 fertilizer composition. This form of repellent is known as a systemic repellent and should be worked into the soil as you would soil nutrients and then water applied to it. The plant then absorbs the repellent from the soil. A single treatment is said to be effective for as many as two years.

Some homemade remedies have claimed to obtain results by tying several pieces of deodorant soap onto the branches of nearby trees. The bar of soap is sliced into a half a dozen pieces and each piece is carefully placed into a mesh bag. The more perfumed the soap is the better it is claimed to work. Don’t bother to use the non-deodorant soap as they do not work as well. Predator urine or manure has been recognized as a deterrent for the deer in the gardens. In conclusion, I would like to provide you with a quick homemade version that you may wish to try.

Start by blending a couple of eggs with several cups of cold water. Place it is a mixer and turn the mixer on high speed. Add the resultant mix to one gallon of water and let it sit overnight. After 24 hours you can then spray the mixture onto your garden plants. The egg mixture used in this homemade formula does not easily wash off the foliage however it is recommended that you re-apply it several times during the growing season. As an added benefit this mixture has been known to repel rabbits as well.