Amity Farm: Deer Tips

Deer like hostas as much as people do – but they express their love in a different kind of way, if you get our drift. They’ll gnaw them things right to the ground, even eat the roots if they can pull up a newly planted hosta. We know this carnage is just what you love to see, after you spent next month’s mad money on your garden. Actually, it’s we at Amity Farm call “Catastrophe” with a Capital C. Here are a few tricks that we’ve come across that seem to help. 1. People urine, spread or sprinkled (use your imagination) at the edges of your hosta bed. NOT ON THE HOSTAS. Please, remember your dignity. 2. We know having a dog around that can bark/cause commotion/spread and sprinkle urine is also a tried-and-true method. Unfortunately, we are CAT people here, and a dog is not in the near future if we intend to keep our marriage intact. 3. Electronic devices that shock the deer have proven to be of assistance. We use the Wireless Deer Fence™, WirelessdeerFence.com. The individual Wireless Deer Fence™ posts are positioned around plants that deer like and on deer paths into your yard or garden. When deer in the area are attracted by a sweet smell to touch a post, the Wireless Deer Fence™ delivers a harmless shock, which frightens them from the area – and trains them to never return. Invented by a smart guy in Indiana. 4. “Liquid Fence.” It really stinks, and the deer think so, too. If we used it here at the farm, we’d even scare the customers away for a week after we sprayed. 5. Rock and Roll. From a blog (not tested here at Amity Farm): “Deer will get accustomed to a radio that plays all night. I have tried the following with success: Set up a motion detector but instead of using a light bulb, plug in a radio. Put the motion detector in test mode. A deer approaches and the radio comes on for 5 seconds. The deer stops. The deer moves and the radio comes on again for 5 seconds. It really spooks them.” 6. Our preferred method, from another blog: “The day before I ordered my Ouzi and camos, I attended a Spring plant day organized by my local Cooperative Extension and picked up a couple of newsletters. One had a very simple remedy for a deer repellent in it. “Damage was beginning to escalate since I apparently had the tastiest selection in the neighborhood. I decided to try the repellent recipe. I bought one and one half dozen eggs and cracked them into a bowl. I beat them enough to break the yolks and mixed the white and the yolk thoroughly. “I stretched a piece of cheesecloth over the mouth of a jumbo size mayonnaise jar and held it in place with a large rubber band (final container has to hold a little more than two quarts of liquid). I poured the eggs through the cheesecloth. The cheesecloth caught the big slimy bits and I threw it away. I added two quarts of water to the beaten eggs in the jar and mixed them together. I used a funnel to pour the egg mixture into a cleaned out Windex sprayer (any sprayer that can be adjusted to spray a mist can be used) and sprayed every plant in my yard, leaves and all. “I didn't drench the plant, I just tried to leave a light coating on most of it up to the height of a tall deer. I refilled the bottle and kept spraying until I used all the egg mixture up. “I swear I had no more deer damage at all the whole summer. This stuff lasted through rain just fine and I have not reapplied it. “Why did this work? Well, the guy who submitted the recipe said he thinks it's because deer have a very keen sense of smell and rotting eggs don't smell very good. The smell to humans is very faint to begin with and non existent after several days. I did not have to reapply for the same reason you have to scrub so hard to get eggs out of pans . . . egg really sticks and it's hard to wash off! I also applied it on a clear day and the egg had a good few days to dry and get adhered before it rained. I should point out that dried eggs are the basis of "Not Tonight Deer" but I found it very expensive and hard to mix and apply. “The man who submitted the recipe has a commercial Christmas tree grove and suffered costly and unsightly damage to his trees every year until he tried this. He sprayed only the surrounding outside row of trees and claims that three years later deer still avoid his trees to the point that they won't walk past the smelly outside trees to get to the untreated inside trees. “I owe a huge debt of gratitude to this guy as he really saved my whole yard and garden. I wanted to pass it on. Its such a wonderful solution . . . it's organic, it's earth friendly, it's long lasting, it's cheap and it does not involve hurting or injuring the deer.” >>> My recipe at Amity farm adds, to the above, a quarter cup of cheap hot pepper sauce and some garlic cloves (one or two). I dump all this stuff into a blender and puree the heck out of it. Make sure you strain all this through the cheesecloth before adding water, then dump this lovely brew into your tank sprayer. Smells just like Buffalo Hot Wings, but that’s not a good thing if you’re Bambi. So, go for it, my friends. Yes, the deer are lovely and graceful creatures. Poor things, there are just way too many for the dwindling wild areas that remain for them to graze. Farmers around here lose too much of their hard-fought grain to browsing deer. There is no solution in the near future. But keep ‘em out of my hostas, please.