Beside the Stream

In the arid West, deer pressure can be pretty intense.  People live on most  of the acreage near the waterways, they’ve diverted most of the water, and the areas that aren’t next to the streams and rivers are often too dry to be very productive.  The deer can get fierce in their need for the plants that you’re growing… and since it was their land and water in the first place, I sympathize to a point. 

I’m happy to have a deer herd around, but I don’t want them browsing my gardens.  So I try to work with them.  I grow plants that they don’t like to eat, mostly cultivars of native species and old favorites.  Daylilies, lavenders, mints and hyssops work fine, and so do lilacs and potentillas.  I used to get plant lists from the state agricultural extension service, and now you can find lists of deer resistant plants online. 

Bob regularly sprays the twigs and foliage with an appalling mixture of rotten eggs, sour milk, garlic and red chili pepper (more on this later).

And I do love that Irish Spring soap.  On every newly planted tree, I tie a bar of Irish Spring in a knee-hi stocking at deer-nose height.  When it rains, that Irish Spring perfume works its way down the trunk and coats the surface of the ground… and deer detest it. 

Here’s a bar of soap that made it though the winter, and to the deer it still stinks.  The bears hate Irish Spring too. 

Here’s a bar of soap that a bear ripped out of its stocking and buried under a red twig dogwood.  I dug it up when I was weeding a few weeks later, and put it back up in another stocking, claw marks and all.  I think Irish Spring is one of those anti-deer miracles. 

If people say it doesn’t work, it’s because they haven’t tried it.