Deer in the Garden

Having a deer in the garden is never a good thing. They're happy to eat your garden plants and cause general havoc in the garden. They are also opportunists, and will take advantage of the open gate that you forgot to close, or the low spot in the garden fence that they can get over. I've found that you need at least 5 foot high fences here to keep the deer out of the garden, and 6 feet would probably be better if you can get fence wire that tall.

My fences are 5 feet high, and that generally works well enough for here in town. In the past, when they've gotten into the garden it was because someone forgot to close the gate in the evening. We've since changed the fence and gate arrangement, with a spring loaded gate that is self closing.

That's all well and good until the deer find an unknown low spot in the fence. The fence is not low from the inside, so I didn't notice that because of the rise just outside one section of fence, it was low enough for the deer to jump it in that spot.

The first time they got in the garden, they ate the tops off most of the sunflower plants, and about half of my pole bean plants, which were finally starting to grow. They generally won't eat potato plants, especially if there's other things to eat. I was surprised that they didn't eat any of the corn plants, but they're already 3 feet tall so they probably weren't interested. They got out of the garden by jumping over a spot in the back of the garden that has snow fencing instead of field wire. The snow fence is a bit lower than the field wire, but they still broke a couple of slats getting over it.

I did some work to block the fence with ropes to make it look higher, and I also put some ropes over the snow fence, holding them up with bamboo garden stakes to keep them in place. Apparently that wasn't good enough, because a few days later they got into the garden again, through the same spot. Apparently, I left enough of a gap in the ropes that they took advantage of it.

You can see how they actually bent the wire down when they went over it and through the gap in the ropes. This fence corner is the corner of the side garden where the red potatoes are planted.

They left a fair amount of tracks where they came in.

This is the raised bed with the green beans. They walked right across the top of it, but at least they didn't eat any bean plants this time. The tracks are a bit harder to see in the straw mulch.

Then they walked across the raised bed where I have my carrots planted. They ate a lot of the carrot tops, but at least they didn't pull out any carrots like they sometimes do. It's funny, I didn't realize there was ao many weeds in the carrots until I saw this picture. That has since been taken care of.

They also ate the leaves off of some of the strawberry plants and the grape vines, which they really seem to like. They got out by jumping over a section of fence that they had to bend down to get over. The fence was loose there because we had replaced a couple of the fence posts, and I hadn't nailed the wire on the new posts, so it was easier for them to push it out and bend it over.

Since I really don't want the deer getting back into the garden again, I decided to raise the height of the fence where they got in with chicken wire, held up with bamboo garden stakes and tall fence posts. I fastened the wire to everything, including the existing fence with lots of zip ties. They won't be able to get between the wire now, and it should be tall enough that they won't try to jump it.

I also nailed the main fence wire back onto the posts where the deer had gotten out and raised it up a bit in the proces since it was sagging a bit from being loose and being bent down. I still have one more spot in the back of the garden fence to work on, but I've never had problems with that section in the past, so I don't think the deer will get in through there. Still, I could be wrong, so I need to do something back there pretty soon.

Well, that's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!