Garden Commentator Barbara Sullivan talks about how to keep deer from spoiling all the fun.
By Barbara Sullivan
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/national/local-national-592162.mp3
Wilmington, NC – While I was lying back in the dentist's chair the other day, the hygienist was telling me about her sleepless night. She'd been up at two o'clock in the morning looking out the window to see if Bambi might be prowling her yard. Well--not Bambi exactly--but a family of five deer who'd decided to use her garden as the local luncheonette. Earlier that day they'd chomped down on every last one of her beautiful roses. She was bummed, to say the least.
What can gardeners do about deer-those lovely, destructive creatures whose habitat is shrinking and who love to eat our tulips, our daylilies and our hostas? At last count there were about 25 million of them in our country. One solution is to plant things the deer hate--like plants with thorns, hairy leaves, a strong scent, or plants with thick, gooey sap. For example, deer aren't crazy about lantana, artemesia, salvias, ferns and most of the herbs. Use native plants as much as you can. It's also a good idea to go easy on watering and fertilizing. That just creates even tastier plants for them. But, every expert in the country will tell you, if a deer's hungry enough it'll eat anything. So plant selection isn't the whole answer.
Another tactic is to discourage them from coming into your garden to begin with. Here we're talking mostly about stinky stuff. Deer reportedly don't like strong smells. Your choices include strong smelling soaps, like Irish Spring or Lifebouy, hung from tree branches or sprinkled around as soap shavings-or there's garlic, hot sauce,,, even rotten eggs.
Then there's the FEAR angle. Since deer reputedly flee the scent of adult male human predators-not to put too fine a point on it-the scent of the predator's urine- you might get your favorite adult male human to wander the perimeter of your yard and contribute to the cause. Human hair's another deterrent. Some folks make the rounds of the beauty parlors to get wads of hair clippings to spread around. Whatever homemade remedy you come up with, the trick is to keep rotating your methods so the deer don't get wise to you.
The most effective deterrent, by all accounts, is a fence. But deer have been known to jump even an 8 foot fence. The absolute best deterrent is a series of barriers of different heights. These could be fences, hedges or even netting strung between poles. Deer get confused when they see these different elevations-and-although they can do the broad jump and the high jump, they can't do both at the same time.
What it comes down to for gardeners is the age old question we face every year: how much indignity can we stand? Mosquitoes, slugs, weeds, squirrels, deer-where will it end? Anyone who thinks gardening is a bed of roses obviously isn't a gardener.
Commentator Barbara Sullivan lives and gardens in historic downtown Wilmington.