I find landscaping with deer the chalange of the centuray. They let you plant and seems like in one night they destroy everything. I truley believe that they sit back during the day in the woods and laugh at me while I sweat and brake my back to plant all the night time treats they enjoy! Deer candy has come off my list, like Daylilies and roses. So now they get toxic plants like Azaleas and Brugmansia. Still the fawns will nibble on those enough to make me cuss, and you know how sound bounces off trees!

I live in southwest Virginia and plan on having my first large garden this year. When I had other small gardens the deer and rabbitts ate all my plants. Other than a fence, is there anything I can plant to keep them away?? Someone told me to plant garlic and onion in the garden. Will this help??

It's been my experience that you either accept that deer will devour anything and everything or you fence to keep them out. Even that doesn't always work: we put up a 7' game fence and they have found two areas they can jump over it, the requirement being a flat area to take a run at it.

So we've extended the height of this fence in those two areas by another foot.

I enjoy wildlife, too - but I enjoy my roses and will do what it takes to keep the deer away from them! Until the fence went up my carpet roses were chewed back to twigs in the ground and hardy as they are, nearly all died.

jc4paws, I doubt that planting unpalatable plants will save the plants that the deer like to eat, even when planted adjacent to each other. I've seen the deer nose around and find what they want! But you could have a wonderful crop of onions and garlic. Ornamental Garlic and chives have wonderful blooms too!

For growing vegetables I use lightweight row covers all season long. When the plants are in bloom and in need of pollination I raise the covers during the day and lower them at night time or on days when we won't be home.

jc4paws? Do you have dogs or cats? I always love the story behind the user names.

I am a gardening consultant and gardening in deer country is my specialty. There is a huge palette of plants, both woody and perennial, that range from not particularly interesting to deer to highly deer resistant to plants that actually tend to send deer away (the latter are plants with strong smelling foliage--achillea, agastaches, perovskia, etc.) Now that said, if deer have the run of a property, they will often develop tastes for plants they usually have no interest in, i.e. Cotinus, Viburnums. So the key is making your property generally unpleasant for deer to be on. Because they are creatures of habit, if you force them to form the habit of avoiding your property, they mostly will, though you will have to reinforce this at certain times of year. Usually this period is early fall when they are scouting out winter browse and late winter/early spring when they are really hungry.

A number of techniques can be used to make the property unappealing: automated water sprays, mirrors hanging in trees, white cloth blowing in the wind, perimeters of strong smelling plants that deer have to psss through. This is effective because a deer's first defense is through its sense of smell. If that sense is "jammed" by strong smells, deer get very nervous and tend to want to get out.

As for vegetable gardens. I have a single strand electric tape around my veggie garden about 3 feet above the ground, which is mostly not turned on. In fall and late winter when deer tend to make exploratory forays into my yard, I bait the fence with heavy duty aluminum foil smeared with peanut butter and attached to the fence with clothes pins and turn the fence on. This attracts deer, but one experience with it sends them racing out of the yard and any other deer present go with them. They remember the experience and spread the word, and they generally keep out of the entire yard area until the critical times of fall and early spring. Then I just repeat.

Most of what I grow, except in the veggie garden, is highly uninteresting to deer, though my technique allows me to grow a few day lilies and a couple of woodies that I know they like, including oakleaf hydrangeas. For extra protection, I spray with Deer Off, but I only need to do this during fall and winter. I don't however grow any deer hot fudge sundays: hostas, yews, rhodies, tulips. No sense advertising a smorgasbord.

i have been looking for a natural way to keep the deer out of the garden and away from my wifes hostas. i have been speading milorganite around the areas i want protected. milorganite is a natural fertilizer made from milwaukee sewage. it is non-burning and is only activated when it is watered. because is dissolves when watered, i have to continually respread it but i get the dual purpose of additional fertilizing trhoughout the season.

I have the solution that works...catch at turtle and put it in a bucket in the garden, of course feed it from time to time..
when the deer comes to the garden they hear the turtle in the tin bucket and the deer run away...this has been tried and true...just catch a turtle from the yard or creek but please give him some food daily,...try this...patticake

My neighbor feeds them, as a result we have tons of them. One morning during coffee on the porch we counted 18 of them in one convoy that crossed my driveway. We got a Scarecrow (the motion detector thing that makes a hissing noise and shoots water), and it works pretty well. It can only reach a small area of my backyard, which is surrounded by a chainlink fence they can jump easy, but they've been staying out of the whole backyard and haven't even come for the lilies they could reach. I don't know if that will last, we've only had it for a short while. But for now the deer are outside the yard eating the chickweed out of the pumpkin bed so I'd say them weeding my garden for me is a big improvement!

I just found this article while searching for information on horse manure as a fertilizer. It's from 1999, but I thought it was interesting. I don't have deer problems, but I know a lot of you do. I thought you might find it helpful, but it might be complete BS as well....or should I say HS :)

Here is a link that might be useful: horse manure as deer deterrent

I know a guy that sprays a little WD40 on his hostas and the deer won't touch them. I'd like to know if anyone has tried it? It seems pretty easy and I guess doesn't hurt the plants.

I don't know if it would hurt the hostas or not, but I wouldn't put it on my plants. Here is a chemists discussion of whats in WD 40.

Here is a link that might be useful: http://yarchive.net/chem/wd40.html