Tips to Discourage Deer & Protect Your Landscaping!

Arggh!  Deer and baby apple trees don’t mix! 

We planted a small apple tree this past spring next to our old pear trees. Now here in the NC mountains just about everyone with a yard or some acreage has an apple tree or two. Or three. This is Apple Country! Never could figure out why there were none planted here on this old homestead and I guess I’ll never know. But I digress…

Somehow the local deer know when we are gone. Never any tree damage when we are in town (the dogs are here, right??) but leave for a few weeks and voila! The whole bottom of the little tree is devoid of leaves and stems when we get back. Once the poor thing gets a bit bigger it will be able to tolerate a bit of nibbling but right now we are just hoping to get it through the first winter. Glad we started off with just one tree and didn’t plant an apple orchard! The poor little thing is next to 3 large pear trees with no damage at all and low hanging pears that have not been eaten. Maybe deer don’t eat pears?

Now, I understand this is not an uncommon problem for most people. The poor deer have lost a lot of habitat and they get hungry, too. How are they to know that this tree or bush is OK but that one will be trouble? How can we help? ThisOldHouse.com had some great suggestions:

• Plant pungent herbs such as garlic, chives, mint and lavender as a border to mask the scent of tender annuals. Prickly or hairy plants also discourage deer.
• Use scarecrows or other moving objects to scare the deer. Suggestions were wind chimes, bright lights, sundials. I remember seeing the vineyards in CA using the shiny silver tinsel that goes on Christmas trees as a deterrent. Easy and very inexpensive unless you are doing a few hundred acres of grapes!
• Put up a fence at least 8 feet high.
• Wrap your new plantings with garden net. We did a combination of the above two for our blueberry bushes at the old house – an 8 foot high chicken wire enclosure with an entry door. Kept out all deer and most birds.
• Use deer repellents. There are commercial ones to purchase plus you can make your own – hot pepper sprays, garlic and rotten egg mixtures, ammonia-soaked rags, bags of hair and blood meal.
• Tie smelly bars of soap to the tree or bush.
• Stake up a row of monofilament fishing line around the plants/trees you are trying to save. 
• Set up motion activated sprinklers – a little extreme for my pocketbook and the size of our property but might work well with a small yard.

We decided to try tying a couple of bars of stinky bath soap to the lower limbs and sprinkling human hair around the tree plus tying some hair to the branches near the soap. Had to do a bit of explaining to a very curious neighbor so he didn’t think we were doing some sort of voodoo… No low leaves remain now and soon all the leaves will be gone for the winter so I will post a follow up in the spring when we see if it worked! And I might just buy some tinsel over the holidays and put it away with my gardening gear just in case!

Have you had problems with critters eating your plants? What worked for you?