It’s been a long, cold winter. Deer and rabbits may be getting hungry and they might head to your garden for a snack.
You can try several things, to keep animals from eating your garden plants. If you attempt enough of these tricks, you should be able to find something that works; unfortunately, it will probably not have an effect for very long. Animals seem to get used to things, so keep trying something new.
We have previously talked about barriers. You can build a fence around your yard or garden. Protect an individual shrub with netting or landscape fabric, or shelter a smaller plant with a tomato cage.
Here are a few other tricks that can be effective for both rabbits and deer:
Soap. Cut a soap bar that has a strong scent into small chunks and set the pieces on the ground around the plants you want to protect. You can even rub a little of the soap on the branches of a plant or shrub; the animals do not like the smell of the soap and they will not like the taste, either. To protect taller bushes, place the bar of soap in a mesh bag and hang it in the top branches.
Pepper. Find recipes online for a spray made with cayenne or red pepper. The spray will wash off, so you have to keep reapplying it, especially after it rains.
One year, I had some sliced hot peppers that had been in the freezer for a year, so I decided to use them as pest protection.
That spring, the rabbits had been chomping on my gladiolus, so I rubbed the peppers on the leaves, left seeds on the ground and hung the rings on the leaves. It looked silly, but I think the rings lasted longer than a spray.
It can be time-consuming to loop pepper rings on an individual plant, but if you have a special plant that the deer and rabbits are bothering, you may want to take the time. Those rings of red pepper could also add color to your winter garden.
Dried blood. Buy a powder made of dried blood (a by-product of the meat-packing industry) in a nursery or garden center. Rabbits and deer do not like the smell. This also acts as a mild fertilizer. Just sprinkle it around your plants.
There are a couple of drawbacks to the dried blood. It might lose its effectiveness, after a rain. Also, some dogs are attracted by the smell and may want to dig where you sprinkled the blood.
Urine. You can buy commercial products that contain coyote urine. Deer and rabbits apparently recognize the smell and want to steer clear of an area that they think is coyote territory.
I have talked to gardeners who say human urine works, too. One woman told me that her son-in-law would take two bottles of beer outside and relax, in the evening. Before going back inside, he would do his part to deter the deer; she said it worked well.
I would not suggest using urine near a vegetable garden on a regular basis. If you would like to try this, please be careful in cold weather and find a spot in your yard that affords some privacy from the neighbors.
Dryer sheets. For deer, use twist ties to attach the corner of a dryer sheet to a bamboo stick that is about 3 1/2 feet tall. Place the sticks all around your garden.
The gardener who tried this said that deer had been eating his vegetable garden for weeks. The day after he set out the dryer sheets, the deer were gone. He said it was like an electric fence.
For rabbits, he used sticks about 1 foot high, so they were a few inches above the tops of his cabbage. It also kept the rabbits away.
In the beginning, he added new dryer sheets to the bamboo sticks every week, then added sheets less frequently. By the end of summer, the deer knew to not come.
Try some of these tricks to keep deer and rabbits from eating your plants and shrubs.
Connie Oswald Stofko is the publisher of Buffalo-NiagaraGardening.com, the online gardening magazine for Western New York. Email Connie@BuffaloNiagaraGardening.com.
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