I hate deer for that reason and they are the most destructive element in my fruit grove. I was told to put Irish Spring soap inside pantyhose and hang on a low branch. It is a deterrent. Nothing magical about IS soap but the strong unfamiliar odor repels them. Gardeners supply also sells a soap type deterrent but it's $20 so better to spend $2 and achieve the same. Once the odor is gone, 1-2 months, replace. Good luck, I know how disheartening it can be

I feel for you. The deer killed a couple trees for us and damaged a Stella Cherry several years ago by rubbing the bark off one side. Now when we plant a new tree we place a cage around the trunk. My husband has also recently installed a motion detector light to come on and shine over much of the orchard at night which is when they come in to eat the apples. We used to hang blood meal and human and dog hair in net bags in the trees, but the blood meal attracted the dogs and vultures so we quit that. We just this spring put up an 8 ft fence around our vegetable garden to keep the deer out.

Break my heart to read this post and others like it. So sorry oldbusy1!

so sorry to hear this. the cage is the best idea. they come to our fruit trees but only eat the bottom leaves off. this year it was only a doe and two fawns, but they left due to the noise here, a neighbor building a church.

Robert, I'm sorry to hear about the fruit trees. I love seeing the deer walking through the woods or across a field, but am not happy when I find them in the yard or anywhere close to the fruit trees or garden.

I used to cage young trees to keep them safe, but in more recent years, I just plant them within a fenced area where the deer are kept at bay by an 8' tall fence. So far, the deer never have breached the fence to reach the fruit trees, but they're still hard on our older fruit trees that grow in an open and unfenced area. No deterrent I've ever tried, except fencing, has been consistently successful over the long term. Irish Spring didn't work for long. Eventually the deer chewed through the nylon stocking 'bags' that held the Irish Spring and nibbled on it in a drought year. It had to be deer because of the height at which the Irish Spring was hanging. Coons or possums couldn't have reached the soap unless they were able to fly.

I hope they resprout and you can graft them and save them, or at least create new trees out of the remains of the old.

We still do, of course, lose fruit and an occasional newer and smaller limb to browsing deer, but only from the older trees. Being old and mighty trees, they produce a ton of fruit, so we can afford to lose some of it to the deer and I don't worry about that much. We always get so much more fruit than we can eat, so when the deer get some, I shrug it off and think that's just one less batch of fruit I'll be canning or freezing.

I've done my best to "train" the deer here to eat at my compost pile by occasionally putting something out there that is intended more for them than for the pile itself. It seems like it works as I often see deer back by the pile, and rarely see them close to the house, yard and garden any more. A few years ago I planted a deer plot mix for the deer back there, and never saw them eat a bit of it, but the rabbits love the clover and eat it every year, so at least we are keeping the rabbits well-fed.

Dawn

The soap-eating was in a horrifically bad drought year. I have had some wetter years when they didn't eat it, but we just went ahead and put up a taller fence so that I didn't have to worry and fret over the deer so much. We are very, very close to the Red River so we have more wildlife that I ever, ever, ever imagined. While we have lots of deer, in a lot of ways, they are the least worrisome of the wildlife we routinely deal with. We've gone 7 weeks now with no rain to speak of, and the deer and rabbits, possums and armadillos, are increasingly coming out in broad daylight searching for food.

We try to coexist and live peacefully with all the wild things, and I love living surrounded by wildlife, but if my garden plots weren't fenced with high fences, I wouldn't even have a garden at all because the deer would eat it all. Been there. Done that. Built a tall fence. I want to fence the front, side and back yards, but my husband hates fences and so far I haven't been able to convince him to fence the yard itself, so the deer ravage our landscape plantings. That means I just don't put much work into planting landscaping plants around the house any longer because they just become deer chow. One of these days, maybe after Tim retires and has more time on his hands, I will have a fully fenced yard (and I don't care if it looks like a prison fence as long as it keeps out the deer) and then I'll landscape it heavily. The first thing we did after buying this place was to clear the land where a fence needed to go around our acreage and then we fenced all 14.4 acres. It took a couple of years, as the woodland was thick and overgrown and it could take an entire weekend just to clear enough ground to put up a relatively small amount of fencing. After spending tons of time and far too many dollars putting up fencing around the acreage, Tim was adamantly opposed to doing any more fencing. I think he hates putting up fencing more than he hates doing anything else under the sun. We now have four fenced garden plots and a big fenced dog yard to keep the dogs safe, so slowly I'm getting the fencing I want, even if it has taken a few (ok, a lot) of years to get it .

Robert, I am sorry to hear about your fruit trees. I don't even try to grow fruit because of so many critters. I see deer often, but so far they have only eaten my sweet potatoes and a few melon rinds I have tossed out into the pasture.

Larry, I haven't seen nearly as many deer this summer as usual. I suspect that the flooding of the Red River (three separate and awful floods within 2 months) pushed a lot of them out of our area and off into another area. Maybe some of "my" deer are visiting you this summer. The river is well within its banks now, but a lot of bottom land remains buried under silt and, until recently, pools and ponds of water that remained behind after the river largely returned to its banks.

The few deer I've seen have become increasingly hungry as the dry spell drags on, so I am seeing more and more of them now than earlier.

Dawn

That month of drought and heat had every varmint looking for something to eat here. So far 11 coon, 3 opossums, 1 armadillo have met their maker. that is for this month only. Seen a mange covered coyote last night and one over in the pasture while I was brush hogging.

Oh, and the trillions of grasshoppers.

Still willing to help out. I bow hunt primarily so there won't be any excessive noise unless permitted.

jmichigan - If you killed Dawn's deer you might have to hire a bodyguard for your own protection. LOL

Carol's right. We don't allow hunting on our property, and since we made our position clear, several of our neighbors have followed suit. We've all had people hunt illegally on our land and have had bullets fly right by our heads, hit our homes or hit our domestic animals, none of which is tolerated. Our "no hunting" policy is not a popular policy with friends and family members who like to hunt, but I just point out that we and our animals live here, this is our home indoors and out, and we do not want bullets flying around.

To a certain extent, killing off the wildlife defeats the purpose of moving to a very rural area to live surrounded by wildlife. We do kill venomous snakes, rat and chicken snakes preying on our chickens, chicks and eggs, and any coon attempting to do the same. We also shoot skunks that are out in broad daylight and obviously rabid. Other than that, we try to peacefully coexist with all the wild things, and I feed most of them, and fill up containers of water for them during times of drought (like we're having right now) so they can find water.

This evening we were outside and had three different groups of deer (all with fawns) come to scavenge around the back compost pile. I generally toss out extra goodies for them back there, and sometimes deer corn, cracked corn or hen scratch if they're looking pretty hungry. We had bunnies in the yard picking up cracked corn the doves hadn't eaten, and hummingbirds at the feeders. There were too many hummers for the feeders, with each feeder having all its little feeding ports occupied, and more hummers buzzing around trying to force their way to the dinner table. Many skirmishes and battles resulted, with hummers zipping around everywhere. It was a perfect evening. I had a blue jay looking for peanuts, but I told him he'd already eaten his day's allotment of peanuts and he'll have to wait until tomorrow.

Robert, Coyotes are the one thing we aren't seeing around here. I can't help thinking that three consecutive rounds of extreme Red River flooding drove them away. It has been a really great year for the cottontails. The hawks and Mississippi kites are very hungry and are annoying our poultry a lot. We've lost a few more free range chickens than we lose in an average year, but the rest of the flock has gotten smarter about hiding and staying out of sight when the predatory birds are hunting. Once a possum started hunting in the yard every night, we've hardly seen any venomous snakes. There's still plenty of non-venomous ones.

It is so hot and dry here that it is just ridiculous. I'd never have believed back in June, or even very early July, we were about to go without rain (not totally without, but almost) for going-on 8 weeks. Our relative greenness dropped from 65% to 56% in one week, and I think our visual greenness, as viewed from our yard, dropped even more. Fires are becoming more common. I hope September will be kinder to us that most of July and all of August have been. We've had about 0.13" of rain in our gauge, and it took 3 or 4 days of rain to get that piddly little amount. The last time good rain was in our forecast, I brought in the rain gauges to wash all the dirt out of them so they'd accurately measure our rainfall, and then nothing fell. I bet the rain gauges are full of dust again. Having relatively low wind has helped keep the grass fires from turning into wildfires, but this flash drought is going to make autumn awful if some rain doesn't start falling soon. Of course, with no rain falling, the grass isn't growing and there's nothing to mow. I think we've mowed twice since mid-July--once in mid-July after the fields dried out after the remnants of Tropical Storm Bill flooded us, and once last week. That's just the yard, not the fields. There's nothing to mow in the fields since they haven't grown much.

We have had a longer dry spell now than we had in the summer of 2011, although I think in 2011 we never got even the little piddly 1/100ths of an inch that we'd have a couple of times this summer (and once a whole 1/10") so it was a drier dry spell, but a shorter one. What saved us (so far) from incredible wildfire activity is that all of 2011 was very dry and rain-deficient even before the summer dry spell and this year we had incredible flooding, so at least our deep soil moisture is good even though the upper soil moisture levels are poor to nonexistent.

We go into September with a KBDI of 631. Other than 2011, I don't know if we've ever had a KBDI that high in August. In one bad drought year, and I think it was 2008, we were around 530 in early to mid-September and having awful wildfires. I hope we have rain before it gets that bad here this autumn. Fire activity is picking up and the firefighters are getting a little edgy.

Today was cooler---only 96 degrees so we only went 1 degree higher than forecast. Since our relative humidity was low, it felt almost nice outdoors----not that I pushed it and stayed out too long in the heat. I'm completely over summer and dreaming of a rainy autumn, which we may or may not have.

Well they struck again last night. Got one of my nectarine trees. I think 2 of the trees will come back if I can keep them protected. I have a couple of sprouts up above the graft so that is good. I wrapped the other one with paraffin tape and hope a bud will come out of the 8" area above the graft. If not maybe it will survive till I can put a new graft on it.

Those little devil! I wish they'd leave your trees alone.

We have a persimmon grove with mature trees that now are too large for the deer to harm, but little tiny persimmon trees pop up all over the place within 50 yards of that grove. I have tried to mow around those young trees and let them grow, hoping our grove will grow and grow and grow to make up for the trees lost when two other nearby groves died during the drought of 2011. Some of the young trees are now 6 to 10' tall. I assume birds and wild animals spread the seed after eating persimmons.

When the deer are in a destructive mood, they'll beat the tar out of those young trees. Sometimes they eat them down almost to the ground. Other times the bucks rub their antlers on them (also a problem with my young peach trees if I don't cage them the first 4 or 5 years) and just beat them to pieces. Generally, the trees recover, though it might take them a couple of years to get back to the size they were before the deer assaulted them.

We have acres and acres of trees, but for some reason the deer like the trees that are more out in the open pastures, not those buried in the dense woodland.

For the last two years, I've only planted new fruit trees within an area with an 8' high fence. I'm just tired of fighting the deer. Can you maybe put up electric fencing to keep them out? I know it would have to have strands high enough they couldn't jump them and low enough they couldn't crawl under them, but it might keep them away.

Try the plastic bags.......

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