Oh, Deer

We live across the street from an abandoned golf course, which is home to a herd of deer. I really thought it was fun having deer in my yard…until I started gardening. The deer usually keep to the golf course during the day, but like to wander into the yards at night. If you were to drive through my neighborhood you might notice the lack of color. Every flower has been nibbled to the ground all up and down the street.

I’m not giving up and I’m not giving in. I decided to fight the deer a couple of different ways. The first is to use some sort of deer repellent, and the second is to plant deer-resistant flowers. Both have had mixed results.

I did notice that the deer ate my hibiscus…now it looks like a green twig in the middle of my flower bed.
They also ate my impatients, which apparently are like candy to deer.

They didn’t, however, touch the rudbeckia….hmmm. So I did some research and found several lists of plants deer like and don’t like. The lists confirmed my experience. They like impatients and don’t like rudbeckia. I saw that deer are not supposed to like asters or vincas, so I headed out and bought some of those to test them out. After day one, no problem. Day two however showed the vincas were nibbled a little and one was pulled right out of the ground. The asters were still untouched. I just went ahead and sprayed deer repellent all over everything and called it a day.

Deer repellent…where to begin…I read everything I could find about different types of deer repellent, such as bars of soap, rotten eggs, etc. None of these things really sounded very useful. I dug a little deeper and found the name of a deer repellent that is supposed to be the most effective…Plantskydd. Plantskydd is made from blood-meal, which, as I found out the first time I used it, means it is blood. You spray it on the leaves of the plant and the smell of blood scares the deer. It works pretty well, it really does. However, it is blood. So now you have bloody flowers in your yard, and they kind of smell like rotting meat (I have a very sensitive nose). I have noticed that the staining does wash off, but then it seems less effective and so it needs to be sprayed more than once a season as recommended (maybe once a week is better?).

So, the saga of the deer in my yard continues.