Outsmarting deer
The trick to keeping deer out of the
garden with our deer deterrent
is understanding deer behavior. Deer follow the same paths day
after day from one known food source to another. Chances are that
if your garden has been nibbled, deer have one to several well worn
paths through the perimeter. A deer deterrent should go smack dab
in the middle of each path.
Finding deer paths is pretty easy. Head out after a rain to look
for the heart-shaped hoof prints in soft soil, and follow them backward
to where they breached your garden. If the ground is too hard for
tracking, keep an eye out for freshly nibbled leaves and use those to
track the deer's path through the garden.
If your garden is large, the deer may try to bypass the first deterrent
and make a new path. That's why I recommend that you keep a close
eye on your garden for the first couple of weeks after you put your
deterrent(s) up. If you see a new path forming, immediately build
a new deer deterrent. It's much easier to keep deer out of the
garden before they consider it their main food source. As you can
see in the aerial photo above, it doesn't take many deterrents to
protect even a large space --- we have six devices to cover about two
acres.
| This post is part of our Homemade Deer Deterrent lunchtime series.
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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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