Deer

Deer are a problem.  For the upcoming 2015-2016 hunting season, the limit will be 12, which indicates how ubiquitous they are.  Few hunters fill their deer harvest, and some of the mountain counties have fairly severe restrictions.  Even so--they're plentiful.  They are definitely copious in my neighborhood.  Over the years I have lived here, there has been less deer pressure some years than there is currently.  I've used a variety of deer mitigation strategies, each of which has weaknesses, and most of which have strengths.  Some have been complete flops.

This is the biggest failure.  It's a little hard to see in the picture, but this is my annual garden.  There's an area that is fenced with three-foot-high chicken wire (to deter rabbits, which it does fairly successfully). The chicken wire is held up by the now-oxidized pale green posts.  For a few years, I had no deer trouble, even though three feet is obviously too short to be a deer barrier.  Then last summer they turned rapacious on me, stripping my okra and cucumbers (which were ascending the welded wire trellises) in one night.  So I got some mylar bird tape and mason twine, pounded in some seven-foot t-posts, and strung the pink lines you see.  I hung mylar streamers from the twine, and thought that might deter the deer.

As you can see, the deer soon realized there was an area they could slither through and still get to the salad bar.  It worked for maybe a week.  When I saw where they were entering, I strung more lines of twine to create a better barrier, but it did not work.   They left the corn alone for the most part, and didn't hit the tomatoes too hard, but everything else was a complete write-off.

The mylar tape is marketed to deter birds, and it might have done a good job of that--I put some in the tops of my blueberry bushes and had less bird action there.  But the deer weren't fooled or impressed.

Later in the summer they crashed through the twine, breaking some strands.  So they had no respect for it whatsoever.  You can also see what they thought of my barrier and my trail camera in this photo:

I've tried other things to deter deer that have been more successful.  More on those later.