Complete success, no. I think the only thing that would be totally successful would be a 20 foot fence. I am on just 3/4 acre and use Liquid Fence (a spray) on the things the deer are most apt to eat. A heavy spraying followed by weekly light touch ups the next 4 weeks, then a heavy spray again, etc. Trouble is, they change their taste all the time. You can't be sure what they will eat from one week to the next. I wish you luck.

I have 6 acres in Chester county near the Delaware and Maryland borders. We are totally overrun with them. My chief goal in gardening in the past 5-10 years has been to find ways of mitigating their attacks. Unless you spray, there are a few things you should have for sure.

Daffodils
Furry leaved things (digitalis, stachys, etc)
Aroids (Jack-in-pulpit, dracunculus, arum, etc)
Salvia
Echinacea
Hellebore
Epimedium
Agastache

Things you should avoid or spray for sure.

Hosta
Daylilies
Lilium

If there are a lot of deer around though, they will eat anything from time to time, and will generally eat the flowers off plants they don't browse on outright.

George

I don't know about deer, but this works great on rabbits.
Cotton balls soaked with coyote urine scattered around the garden.
My hubby is into trapping and coyote urine is available where ever you can get trapping supplies.
Jackie

I've had success, by choosing only deer resistant plants. Russian sage, miscanthus, monarda, lambs ears... there's lots of stuff they don't seem to eat. Junipers, spruces, barberry, spirea, mints.. I could go on and on.

I was staffing a plant sale at Jenkins Arboretum in Devon (on the mainline outside Philadelphia) this weekend. The conversation turned to deer many times. One tactic that seems to be doing fairly well is using Milorganite (Milwaulkie Sewage Sludge) on the ground in conjunction with an electric fence when snow is on the ground and the Milorganite is ineffective. The electric fence must have at least three strands, one low one, one deer-nose high and one higher. Many people hang aluminum foil with peanut-butter bait on the fence to make sure the deer get a "feel" for it.

Here is a link that might be useful: Milorganite

I live on 33 acres and for the most part deer don't come around to bother my plantings, unless I use the tasty perennials they love. They do, however manage to have a annual garden party in late winter to prune my cotonester, juniper, even a yucca this year. Prior to my fields being planted in field corn I would get mineral and regular salt licks and place them far away from my landscaping, near the tree lines for them to wander there. Now the the corn is very close to the house they will munch on that and not my gardens. If you have a neighbor with a tractor you can always plant field corn far from the house too for a trap crop.

I live in Washington, Pa on 10 acres surrounded by 100 acres of farmland and woods. I have had my hollies, yucca, rhodies and junipers decimated this winter!! And it was a MILD WINTER !!!!
Last year I tied plastic grocery bags to my bordering trees, they seem to think it is the white tail danger signal, looks great !!! But it worked for a while !!!

Good luck !!!

Some of the smaller hot pepper plants are quite decorative, and I think they tend to make deer more cautious about sampling anything else planted nearby.

Try to plant something poisonous near anything particularly tasty. Daffodils were mentioned; there is also Monkshood. Lily of the Valley is poisonous, as are Foxgloves. There are internet sites that list all the poisonous garden plants....

Yew shrubs are poisonous, and so are the little shrubs that turn bright red in the fall (but are advised agaist because they spread)that are frequently used for borders.

For small areas with your best plants, hanging garden bells that would almost have to be brushed against to get to the plants (if protected on one side by a hedge) would at least alert you that your plants are in danger, and might possibly alarm the deer enough to ward them off.

There are quite a few attractive but thorny shrubs out there as well, although they are not as much fun to prune as those without thorns.

My hubby has a township vegetable garden near deer, and we found that deer love Lutz beets. That might be another possibility for a trap crop for you. He usually plants a row of the beets between his veggies and the treeline that the deer tend to come from.

I tried to fight them for years with sprays and such with some success. But I found if there's a drought they will eat through any spray you use, and the plants you saved all summer are gone in one night. This happened with 40 tomato plants I babied all summer. All that was left when I returned from a two day business trip were tomatoes smaller than the size of a nickel.

I finally fenced in the back two acres of my property with the black polyvinyl 8' high fence. They can jump it but must be stressed severely or chased by a large dog or coyote to do so. It is not indistructible. Groundhogs and knawing critters will eat through it, making holes in the bottom the deer find all too easy to slide under. I was amazed to see that a full grown deer can slide through a hole that's only 10" high. What I did to foil that was attach chicken wire to the bottom of the poly fence. That worked. The poly fence has been up about nine years and is as good as the day I put it up, but any fencing requires maintenance as does this one. Not cheap, but if gardening is your hobby and the reason you bought your property (which is why I bought mine) you can't let a herd of deer stop you.

I live on a small property in Downingtown. I back up to a campground, and there are deer all over the place. We can hear them at night when we sit out on the deck and get eaten by bugs. We've seen them at the entrance to the neighborhood during the day, but not too often. But for some reason, I've never had problems despite having loads of Hosta, Daylily, and some other plants mentioned above. The only thing I can think of is my one neighbor's dog may keep them at bay. It is a fairly large dalmatian mix (at least it looks like one) that every now and then gets loose but doesn't stray far. How effective are dogs against deer? I would imagine quite, unless the deer figured out that the dog goes in every night. I don't know how many of the posters are dog people? I read an excerpt in a book that says that those obnoxious singing trout are great because it is motion activated and flaps and makes a lot of racket when approached. The inhuman singing would probably scare the deer away for a good long time!! Mount one in the garden somehow, and presto!! Instant guardian!!

Last evening I came upon a doe munching right in the middle of my front garden, just a few feet from the front door. She looked me in the eye and then trotted calmly off, still chewing.

I checked the next day to see what she'd eaten. She had reached past the peonies and bee balm to eat a WEED!

Deer that only eat weeds... wouldn't that be awesome???

I planted an abelia line of defense facing my woods--deer playground. The deer haven't eaten the abelias and they bloom. There are various sizes of them too.

We have lived in our house for a little over a year and a half. We always saw the deer out in the woods but never really on our property. We planted some hostas on our back hill last year and they were eaten and I thought it was the rabbits. But this year I found out it was the deer. This year we started on the landscaping since there was non previously. Now they venture all through the yard eating the hostas, phlox, lily leaves (no buds have emerged yet.) I was given 2 large hostas from a friend when visiting there and planted them down by the road and the mailbox. we have never seen them down there. Wouldn't you know it 12 hours later we woke up and found a mommy and 3 babies feasting on them. They weren't in the ground just 12 hours.

We do not know our neighbors but we see them occasionally and I am going to ask them if they use anything. They have a bunch of hostas and lillies and they are all in tact. They are also by the road and their house. So I don;t know if the deer don't venture over there or if they use something.

I am going to try a few of the suggestions I read here. I'll post if anything seems to work.

Ruth