Deer vs. Apple trees

[Jstpssng]

Yep, deer will eat or try to eat anything.

I had a 24" orange traffic cone in the waterway of my corn field marking a spot for spring work.

Deer took 3 bites out of it.

We flagged out a stream buffer years ago with blue ribbons.
When we went back the next day they were all on the ground. A deer had followed our tracks, and not every one of them, likely just out of curiosity.
Everybody knows how much crows love trash bags. I had run a roll of plastic mulch out for my garden of the material; then left the roll still attached at the end.
Before I got home the next day they had destroyed it.

 

[kenmbz]

We had a deer jump our pool fence this winter, luckily the cover held, the prints went back and forth for a few runs and then the deer jumped back out.
So a 5 foot fence would be pretty useless, why I go for 7'.
Or as another person wrote here, 2 rings of fence so they don't think they can make it.
But better use some fence they can see easily. or they will get caught in the fence (and they are not easy to get out !)

 

[rumwrks]

But better use some fence they can see easily. or they will get caught in the fence (and they are not easy to get out !)

I actually tried an entirely alternative strategy to that a few years back.

I was co-farming on a shared space and we were putting in a moderate sized corn patch (not huge, maybe a couple thousand square feet total - enough for sweet corn for 4 or 5 families and a nice batch of tamales). So we didn't really want to invest a lot of $ in fencing.

I'd put up a couple of game cams so we had a pretty good idea of what was going on..

First we tried somebunch of the so-called deterrents, the bucks were sneaking in and eating the blood meal and blood meal derived products (plantskydd).. so that was a fail.

The next thing I tried was some 30lb fishing line strung ever 12" or so apart to about 7' high (I put in corner posts and kinda rednecked some bracing in between them..). That.. actually... mostly worked much to my surprise. The bucks were 100% deterred for some reason. We think they might have been afraid of getting their antlers hung up or something (they had experience with other wire fences in the area). Most of the does also stayed out. There was one doe who'd houdini through the fence one.. leg.. at.. a.. time.. with this really smooth motion. She didn't actually eat any corn though and just kind of hung out eating weeds between the rows so we didn't mind her to much. The rest of the deer would hang out around the outside of the garden.

I also had some luck with kind of "guiding" deer by hanging a thin wire at about 3' high and then hanging tin cans or pie plates on it every 10' or so so they'd bang and rattle if the wire was touched. If they really wanted to get through there they would, but if you kind of worked with that as a way to redirect some of the trails a little bit.. it was somewhat effective.

Having said that, different deer do seem to react to different things so I sure ain't claiming the above it universal hah.