One of the most common questions in the world of gardening is how to keep deer out of the garden. There are many different approaches to solving this problem. The level of effectiveness in your solutions depends on how much deer pressure you have and how much time or resources you are willing to invest in keeping the deer out.
Deer will happily destroy your garden, and favorite shrubs, or even kill young cherry trees if you let them. Once they find a food source you can be sure they will return.
Two Methods to exclude deer
To keep them out of your garden we either need to exclude or deter them. Excluding deer is 100% effective when everything goes right. Considering they can’t jump the fence or get in through an open gate. The downside to exclusion is the cost of erecting a fence, especially one tall enough to a hungry deer or two from jumping it.
Deterrents on the other hand are a faster and less expensive solution. Some deterrents include scented bar soap, deer repellant concentrate for sprays, motion-sensors alarms or water guns, or even human hair. While deterrents can be effective, typically if a deer is hungry enough it will make it past deterrents. When you have tried one of the deterrents and need to come up with a better solution here are some of the ways you can exclude deer.
Excluding Deer
Here is a list of different fencing methods to keep deer out of gardens. Some will work better than others but the best working fence is going to be expensive, especially if you want to keep deer out of your whole property. If you have the money the best method is to build an 8-10′ tall fence that a deer cannot jump.
High Fence
A high fence is normally a minimum of 8′ tall and encompasses the area you want to exclude deer. The better designs for a tall fence sell a ground anchor sleeve and pole separately. This means no overhead hammering on a ladder. After you slam in your posts there is a polypropylene net that attaches to the posts. If you are only fencing in a small area this is a great solution. It only becomes a huge investment when you are hoping to exclude acres!
Slant fence
I have built a slant fence as we had a lot of deer pressure right outside the farmhouse in our market gardens. Even with our guard dog barking on the other side of the fence, we would have significant deer pressure in our 1-acre field that has a lot of great deer food in it.
A slant fence is like a high tensile cattle fence but instead of being vertical, the fence is at an angle with the highest wire pointing above the deer’s head. The reason this works is that the deer looks at the fence and doesn’t think that it can jump over the top without landing on the lower wires at the end of the slant. What makes this work is their perspective and fear of landing on the fence during their jump.
We had marginal success with the slant fence and I think the success would have been better if I had put strainers on all the lines. Without the strainers, the fence has a bit of sag and is nowhere as daunting as it could be under full tension. Adding in-line strainers is on my to-do list but one unexpected action caused a significant reduction in pressure this past season.
We cleared out some of the wood lines for a future orchard and I didn’t see any deer damage all season in an area that was once highly pressured. I think the deer didn’t feel a sense of safety without the former coverage that was there to hind behind in the day.
A slant fence requires fence posts, high tensile wire, post-fence insulators if you want to make it electric, and gates. You can easily fence in a much larger area for way less money with a slant fence vs a high fence.
Double layer temp fence
The double-layer temp fence is one of my favorite low-cost and easy-maintenance deer fences out there. The idea is that you make it so that the deer don’t have enough space to jump into your garden. They can jump high and short but this system calls for temporary step-in posts and a minimum of 3 electric strings. The outermost fence line will have one electric line at deer nose height and then you want about 4 feet of separation between the next fence line which will have a high and low electric line. Plug in your electric charger and grounding rod and the deer will hate you for the exclusion.
You may want to figure out how much space to put in between your fence lines based on your lawnmower dimensions for easy maintenance. This should be an easier fence to maintain grass than the slant fence. Another thing to consider is to use t-posts with insulators for your corners or those plastic step-in posts will bend. That means your fence is more likely to sag without strong corners.
Orange fence
The orange plastic netting is a common low-cost deer fencing. While I can’t find any evidence that it works, there are enough people that use this method that it may be worth experimenting with. It probably makes more sense with smaller gardens, in that it hides the garden from the viewpoint of the deer with the colored plastic. The most common color used I’ve seen is blaze orange probably due to the correlation with hunters using this to be seen by other hunters but not deer.
Fishing line
Our last low-cost fence idea is to mount at least 1 layer of clear fishing line to any sort of post. Mount it around the head height of the deer so while it’s walking up to your garden it will run into the line and wonder what in the world just touched me and run off in fear. In a low-pressure garden, this may work but when you are dealing with starving or multiple deer it’s only a matter of time until one deer sets off the trap and another one comes in while it is down.
Other ways to reduce pressure without sprays or exclusion
For smaller scaled gardens having a water gun on a motion sensor is a great method to keep deer out. They sell these in most garden centers.
Another way to deal with heavy deer pressure if you don’t have time to build a fence is to use insect netting. We used to use insect netting on all of our lettuce and carrot beds mainly to keep deer from chowing down. The downside to exclusion netting is that it’s rather expensive per square foot and it is subject to blowing away with heavy wind.
My favorite method?
Even though I haven’t tried all the fence methods. My favorite deer fence is a low-cost, easy setup, easy removal, and successful deer fence for a large area. I think the double-layer temporary fence is the best contender.
This coming season, I am planning to try out the double-layer temporary fence method on one of our larger gardens. I like that it’s not as permanent as a slant fence and it doesn’t require much time to set up either. Also, the majority of the maintenance should work with my zero-turn mower as well. The slant fence on the other hand needs string trimming to maintain.
If I had a smaller garden I would probably also try the double-layer fence because who wants to look at a 10-foot fence or a bright orange plastic fence covering up the beauty of the garden?
