The Buck Stops Here:
Deer Proof Your Garden and Yard

Story by K. Andarin Arvola

To appreciate our wild neighbors it helps to understand their strengths and their place in the environment instead of just focusing on what a nuisance we think they are. Any wild animal is attracted to an area primarily because of a food source.

Deer are of of those wild neighbors. Some folks think they’re “Bambi” cute, others pests; gardeners despair of ever having a deer-free landscape; hunters think of them as a food source and many people are completely indifferent to them. However we feel about them, since we live in a largely rural area, the deer outnumber us.

There is no one answer to what our species see as problems with the black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus) we have on our north coast. I’ve heard deer referred to as “rats with hooves” and there’s some truth to that statement. As individuals and collectively, they’re extremely adaptable, second only to a rat, according to some scientists and most gardeners.

Black-tailed bucks can weigh up to 150 pounds and stand thirty-eight inches tall with antlers that are shed each year; does weigh up to 110 pounds and are thirty-six inches tall.

Understanding deer helps in deterring them from the places we don’t want them, usually our yards and gardens. Deer have a wide assortment of traits that enable them to survive; they are after all, prey animals and avoiding predators is their first priority.

A keen sense of smell enables deer to identify what to eat, to distinguish their young, to find their way around, and to recognize enemies.

Their sight is also sharp. They can spot your garden from a half-mile away. They have roughly a 310-degree field of vision and can see in low light. Deer instantly detect motion. I’ve stood quiet and still and had deer stamp their feet trying to illicit movement so they know what their dealing with. Because they are built with speed and agility, deer can seemingly jump tall buildings at a single bound. They’ve jumped my five-foot fence from a stand-still. Black-tailed deer seem to slip in and out of our yards and gardens like ghosts.

Those big ears constantly swivel to catch any sound that indicates danger.

Although it seems that deer constantly dream up ideas to decimate our yards and gardens, it just isn’t so. Deer are driven almost entirely by instinct which includes not becoming a meal for a predator, eating, resting and dominating other deer—except during mating season when that’s the priority and when bucks can be dangerous.

Deter with physical senses
Using their physical senses to dissuade deer from turning your yard into a smorgasbord does not mean harming the creatures.

That keen sense of smell can be used to their disadvantage. For a time. Then whatever it is has to be switched to something they aren’t used to. Foul smells can be as simple as hanging strongly-scented soap in trees, making your own rotten smelling concoction or buying someone else’s putrid concoction. They work, but not forever, and can be expensive and time-consuming. They wash off in a rain. They smell bad to you, too. Noxious smelling plants usually work better.

In the same vein, sprays that make plants taste bad takes advantage of one of their physical senses. There can be initial damage to nonfood plants while the deer are taste-testing your yard but they soon learn nothing is good to eat—unless there’s nothing anywhere in their territory and they’re starving. There are commercial items or you can experiment with making your own. Usually they consist of hot stuff—cayenne, Tabasco or other hot pepper sauces.

Those large ears swivel like radar and give the deer a vital advantage. They learn what sounds are normal in their world but instantly startle if a twig cracks nearby. Loud sounds work for a while but do you want a radio blaring, tin cans creating a ruckus in a wind storm, things going “boom” in the early morning when the deer are most active? Not! And neither will any of your neighbors.

Their sharp eyesight allow deer to be hyper-vigilant about predators—they are looked at as a meal, by us humans as well. If there are fast movements they bolt but not for long. They learn rapidly that scarecrows in a garden aren’t a threat. Water sprinklers blasting on at random intervals just use water.

Combining things that smell bad, taste worse, sound awful and randomly move is another strategy.

What does work well is a dog, or better, two dogs. You don’t need a fancy dog or even a big dog; any dog that looks, smells and sounds like a dog will work. The deer think “wolf.”

Know thy deer
Understanding their nutritional needs can play a part in successfully discouraging deer. Although it is oversimplifying it, in spring and summer their nutritional needs are greater because of new offspring for does and growing antlers for bucks. If their territory is experiencing a drought, for example, there may not be sufficient food and they will seek it elsewhere. If we have a well-watered lawn or garden, who can blame them?

| Damage from deer is not just from their eating our plants. In the fall when bucks are in rut, loosing the velvet from their antlers and advertising their availably to does, they will rub on small trees and shrubs. If it’s something we planted that spring, the deer may appreciate it, but we don’t.

Being creatures of habit our local black-tailed deer often have established trails, areas they regularly find feed and bed down. When we build a house in some areas we disrupt their habits, but may not change them. We may put a garden right in the middle of what the deer consider a freeway exchange.

Damage in our yards and gardens may seem to be deer, but there are plenty of other culprits. Wild turkeys populations are exploding, rabbits, raccoons, even domestic animals can do damage. To tell what is invading your garden notice the time of day. Deer typically feed at dusk and dawn and black-tailed deer are even more nocturnal than other species.

Look for tracks, but again goat tracks can look similar to deer. It pays to know what animals are in your area. Deer and rabbit scat (or droppings) can be confused if there are no tracks.

Yard and garden
Now that we understand a bit more about deer and we know that it’s deer that are damaging our yard and garden, how do we either learn to live with them or prevent them from continuing the damage?

Reassess. Reassess our need for a pristine landscape, an abundant vegetable garden, an orchard of fruit trees or a combination of all three.

In the yard it’s again important to remember that deer have different nutritional needs at different times of the year.
There is no one single answer but there are answers.

Look for plants you like and deer don’t, give up on plants they love (to eat), and find a design for your yard that incorporates deer resistant plants that please you but not the deer.

Deer love to eat
They seem to try most anything and particularly new, tender leaves or shoots in spring. This is, of necessity, a partial list of favorite foods: azaleas, apples, cherries, fringe tree, peaches, plums, pears, saucer magnolia, and the favorite “candy” of all—roses.

In the garden they love beans, blackberries, broccoli, cauliflower, grapes, peas, corn, strawberries and need I even mention, lettuce.

Ornamentals in your yard to avoid are all lilies, impatiens, pansies, and spring bulbs, especially tulips.

Plants deer avoid
In times of plenty, deer avoid much that if hungry enough, they will eat. The list of plants are ever-changing.

Most trees, when mature, are usually not bothered by deer but it pays to protect young trees. Here they don’t bother redwood, Douglas fir, most myrtle, madrone, pines and tanoak.

A few deciduous shrubs that are deer resistant are chokecherry, elderberry, golden currant, lilac, and winter jasmine.

Ground covers that seem resistant are juniper, heather, heath, manzanita and wild strawberries.

There are a nice variety of perennials that are deer resistant and can brighten a yard or garden. Baby’s breath, black-eyed Susan, bleeding heart, many fuchsias and California fuchsia, coreopsis, daisies, iris, lobelia, lupine, poppies and sedum.

It’s worth it to plant annuals and some will reseed themselves, just not as prolifically as perennials. Try bachelor buttons, calendula, California poppy, cosmos, larkspur, sunflowers, sweet alyssum and zinnia.

It’s mostly the Mediterranean herbs that fare the best with deer. Unlike us, they don’t care to flavor their meals with chive, hyssop, lavender, mint, oregano, rosemary, sweet marjoram and thyme.

Another successful solution is to use plants native to the area. These plants have lived with generations of deer for hundreds of years. Any of the larger trees, fir, pine and redwood. Shrubs such as wax myrtle, huckleberries both red and blue, coyote bush and small-leafed ceanothus.

Strategies for success
Remember, knowledge is power. Deer are creatures of habit. They mostly bed down in the same place, feed in the same areas and follow the same trails.

If they have established trails, disrupt those by putting noxious (to deer) plants along the entrance to your property, using deer repellent. Or move deer-beset plants to a less traveled area, it may do the trick.

If the deer are eating a particular plant see if there’s a substitute they don’t like. Love those tulips? So do deer but they leave daffodils alone and there’s a wide variety of colors, shapes and flowering times. You can even have roses if they’re of the rugosa hybrids. They have thorny canes, tougher leaves, and intense fragrance.

Planting combinations of what they like behind what they don’t like will often confuse deer.

Remember that deer want to see where they’re going or if they jump something, where they’ll land. Obscure their sight-line by planting a solid hedge with a dense enough border inside and out and they may keep to their own territory.

Deer have a sweet tooth, so tidy up under berry bushes and fruit trees. No sense in tempting them beyond endurance. Remember those big noses and that keen sense of smell?

Water is, of course, a major necessity of deer. If there isn’t a stable water source nearby they may resort to your well-watered garden, especially in a drought. Those plump leaves, that green lawn, may not look like a water source to us, but it is to deer. Practice xeriscaping by using less water, mulching with material deer don’t like and using graveled pathways instead of grass.

What does work
As mentioned, dogs work.

Fences work. They can be initially expensive but in the long run, they keep the deer out—unless you leave a gate open or don’t patrol them, especially after a storm.

Our black-tailed coastal deer aren’t the jumpers that other deer are but they’re very wily at sneaking in under fences or wriggling through small gaps.

The primary consideration is to fence first and plant later. If the fence is up, the deer will have learned to avoid your yard.

It used to be thought that a deer fence had to be a fortress. Now, that’s no longer true. Any number of fencing materials can be used. Wire mesh with barbed wire, wood and wire or black plastic mesh on thin plastic posts with the right landscaping seems to disappear.

Electric fences make great deterrents—when there’s electricity. In our rural area we can have from one to seven days of power outages. The deer will figure it out.

Fences can be built at an angle to make jumping them less inviting. Using two parallel fences makes an area too wide to jump and too close together to jump separately.

At my home I have a twenty-foot wide breezeway to separate two horse pastures. It’s to keep the stallion and the mares from being too close to each other. The fence is five-foot non-climb welded-wire with a rolled wire on top and a solid gate. Although it’s been up several years, last year I looked at the space and said, “Garden!” And it’s now the vegetable garden and no deer have been in. The turkeys yes, but no deer.

Individual garden solutions
Pam Rivette and I talked about her solution to deer problems. “I’ve been a gardner all my life,” she tells me. She moved to several acres outside Fort Bragg from Rancho Murieta, east of Sacramento, six years ago.

The first thing she mentioned was that in Rancho Murieta the deer never bothered Japanese maples. “Here people laughed when I said I was planting them. And sure enough the local deer ate them—like candy.”

For a few years she had a minimal garden with “what I thought were, and was told were, deer resistance plants,” Rivette says. “Probably about fifty percent of the plants turned out to be deer resistant.”
Part of the problem, she says, “is you get something from a nursery that has been raised here, fertilized, cared for and in peak condition, then you take it home and that makes it very tasty for deer. They’ll try anything new; they do a taste test.”

I asked about using just plants native to the area or using deterrent sprays. “Not all natives are deer resistant and deterrents have to be kept up with and changed. After a while the deer get used to whatever deterrents you use. You have to swap them out,” she informs me. “Unfortunately, the only way you can tell they’re not working is that your plants start getting eaten again.”

Realizing that she wanted to increase her knowledge of coastal gardening she took the Master Gardener training from the U. C. Davis Extension in January of 2007.

“The coast is so very different from the Central Valley. It’s almost like starting over. Additionally, part of the volunteer work I wanted to do was to help people with gardening issues.

“When I retired there was finally time for the extensive and varied garden I always wanted on my property. But then there was the time expended and expense of the seemingly never-ending search for deterrents. That’s when I put in the fence.” She fenced a little over an acre nearly four years ago. Now she has no deterrents except the fence.

Not everything can be fenced out. Before she put in the perimeter fence, Rivette also had a marginal fence around a vegetable garden left over from the previous owner. “Then a bear came through the area and through the fence. Of course nothing will keep a large determined bear out.

“For deer, some folks say an eight-foot fence is the only way to go. That may be so on level ground. I have rugged, uneven terrain and the seven-foot fence I chose seems enough. Haven’t had a deer in the yard.” She laughs, “Well, except the time I left the gate open.” She had trouble finding gates that would be high enough so she has six-foot gates that are solid so deer can’t see through them.

Rivette says to keep gates latched because deer will test a gate; if they can push it open they will. “You can’t go to the grocery store and leave the gate unlatched and wonder why, when you come back, your property is full of deer.

“There are numerous fence designs but basically if they can’t see through the fence or can’t get a clear landing site it’s an effective deterrent.”

The fence Rivette finally decided on is a combination of wood 4 in. x 4 in. posts and metal posts with six-foot orchard wire and a strand of barbed wire a foot above to make it seven feet high. Her garden is flourishing. “I have planted some ‘canaries’ in my garden near the house so I tell if there have been any deer. These plants, such as roses and Japanese maples, are not just inside the fence because you don’t want to tempt deer.

“Another successful tactic is to plant natives that aren’t interesting to deer, not only inside the fence but on the outside as well, so they are aren’t attracted to the area.”

Since Rivette has uneven ground, there were spaces under the fence that had to be blocked so the deer wouldn’t crawl under. “It’s also necessary to check because other critters dig under the fence and create just enough of an opening for a deer to wiggle under. And be sure to check after storms for damage, such as fallen limbs, that can let in deer,” she says.

After years of gardening with natives and using a variety of deterrents, Rivette is pleased with her solution. “The initial expensive of building the fence has more than paid for itself in my pleasure with the variety of plants I’m able to use,” she concludes.

Public garden solutions
Public gardens like the Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden have problems with deer just like the rest of us, even more so since their garden is forty-seven acres.

Started in the early 1960s by Ernest Schoefer, the garden has delighted visitors and locals for years. With the temperate coast climate there’s always something blooming. Kristina Van Wert and I took a walk and talked about deer and gardens. Van Wert wears several hats at the garden—gardener, plant recorder and Master Gardener coordinator.
Initially the only thing fenced at the garden was the roses. Roses are a deer’s favorite treat. Once discovered, they will return time and time again until they eat them all up. A combination of solid fence and gates and wire kept them at bay.

About seven years ago, the upper end of the garden was deer-fenced. Now that about fourteen acres of the garden has been fenced with a combination of mesh deer fencing, solid fence and stout gates there is a great deal more variety of plants.

The garden is not only a place to enjoy, it’s a terrific resource for advice and education. Staff will answer endless questions and suggest plants for individual solutions. How much do you want to learn? Volunteer. The education is practical and hands-on. Van Wert also coordinates the Master Gardener course through the University of California, Davis. The next training is in January.

“People move here, often from urban areas, because they want to be closer to nature. After about a year or so they may change their minds,” she informs me. “There are ways to garden with deer but when people have tried everything else exclusion is the solution.

“If you move to the country to enjoy nature you have to give nature its fair share. Leave an area for the wildlife that’s here; leave ways in and out of those areas,” she says. “Plus, the more your neighbors fence off their land, the greater pressure from deer on your yard.

“It’s possible to design a garden that doesn’t attract deer but you sacrifice variety. In Van Wert’s own extensive garden she started out planting an herb garden around the house so that deer wouldn’t think of her place as a culinary destination. Then the vegetables went in and “each individual bed had to be covered or fenced. It was expensive and time-consuming. We finally used mesh deer fencing around part of the property,” she tells me. “Closing the gate is the most critical—they seem to wait for an open gate.”

Excluding deer means building a fence.* “Deer fence, if it is solid, can be about six feet high. Although deer can easily clear six feet, they don’t like to jump over anything when they can’t see where they’re landing. If not solid, the fence should be at least seven feet high,” she says.

“Almost all vegetables are deer candy. But in our vegetable garden here at the Garden we only have a short field fence with several strands of wire on top. It’s about four feet high, yet we’ve never had a problem,” Van Wert said.

“We think it’s because there’s so much else for them to eat,” she says. Also, they put deer resistant plants just inside and outside the fence that makes it less attractive to deer. “It’s a mix of deer-resistant perennials intermixed with Mediterranean herbs, such as lavender, that are unappetizing to deer.”

Deer do get into the perennial garden occasionally. “Deer will test the fences and the gates but usually it’s because a large branch or a tree comes down,” says Van Wert. “They will take advantage.”

We meet up with Lily Ricardi who has worked in the perennial garden for fifteen years and has her own gardening business. They give me a list of the top “deer candy” plants that includes roses, geraniums, camellias, lilies in general, astillbe, and hebes.

“There are no plants that I consider deer proof, only deer resistant,” Van Wert emphasizes. “There are so many factors—the age of the deer, the conditions it’s living under, is there plenty to eat, is there a drought and food is scarce—so many considerations,” she explains.

Plants that have been deer resistant over the years are euphorbia, rosemary, rhododendron, helichrysum, any ornamental grasses, kniphofia, Erica (heath) and Calluna (heather).

“Rhododendrons do especially well here. Climatically this area is excellent,” Van Wert informs me. “Not only the natives but species straight out of the wild such as those from China. Most people don’t realize how many fragrant rhodies there are.”

To sum up, if deer in our yards and gardens is a problem, there is no one answer. There are multiple strategies, some work better than others so it helps to be inventive, use what is proven and even learn to live with our wild neighbor.

* See “Fencing on the North Coast: A Sense of Place”, Real Estate Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 22, April 17, 2009.