Deer-free garden
We haven't seen any deer
damage in our garden in a couple of months, and even then their
depredations were minimal. Compare that to years past when our
entire growing area was repeatedly defoliated by the hooved fiends, and
you'll understand why I think Mark is a genius.
Last year, I was
thrilled by the deer deterrents Mark made using old
display motors, but those motors burnt out quickly and left holes in
our defenses. His most recent incarnation uses rotisserie motors,
which seem more hard core and also go a bit more slowly so that that
the noise is harder for deer to acclimate to. To put the icing on
the cake, the golf balls now hit brass cups, which makes the noise more
pleasing to human ears --- very similar to a wind chime.
To be fair, it's really
tough to find the true cause of our current absence of deer because
every year is a bit different. Maybe wild foods are especially
abundant this year, but we don't seem to be having a mast year on our property. And
the deer pressure is still quite strong --- a neighbor told me that
he'd recently cruised down our two and a half mile road and counted
fifty deer. Granted, I did take a potshot over the head of a deer
a few months ago when he found a gap in our deterrents and ate my
beans, but the efficacy of scare tactics like that has been short term
in the past. In previous years, I've lost the entire fall garden
in one fell swoop to the deer.
We're hoping to have
some guinea pigs test out deer deterrents around their own garden to
give us a bit more data --- Mark
has offered two free t-shirts to anyone who sends us some photos (and
feedback) on their deterrents in action. Your first step
should be to read our instructions to make
your homemade deer deterrent. Those instructions
use a motor that we no longer recommend, but it should be simple to add
in the rotisserie motor and take out the drill, transformer, and
resistor using the information Mark has been posting on his deer deterrent blog. You can leave a
comment here or there if you have trouble and we'll point you in the
right direction. I estimate that your total cost to produce a
deterrent (assuming you buy everything new) will be about $30...or
considerably less if you do a bit of scavenging for components.
I know that we have a
lot of handy readers, so I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up
with. Erich, Zimmy, consider yourselves challenged.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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