Kitchen Garden Forum

Imagine my surprise when I arived at my plot, in a friends orchard. Runner & French Climbing Beans gone Bare canes to at least 3ft high. Do we have giant slugs, rabbits ?
The neighbour called from his garden, "The Deer were having a feast". Deer had been munching my Beans. Apart from an 8ft fence
has anyone got advice/ideas to deter them please.

Hi Elen,
It is a good few years since we had to protect things from deer.
In the end we had to erect extentions to our existing fences with three strands of wire. We had some stainless steel round discs made and suspended these from the wires in an adhoc fashion and if there is a breeze they move and you wiil find that the trouble generally occurs on moonlit nights and the stainless steel discs very effectively deter the deer by reflection.
Hope this helps.
JB.

Thanks for your reply Johnboy. I will keep this one in mind

Farmers use coloured plastic feed bags for the same reason - they move and rustle in a breeze. I have also read that the smell of human hair puts deer off but I can image you would need a lot of it and their effect would wear off after some rain in any case.

This issue was a nightmare for the owner of a local vineyard near us. The deer would come in near harvesting time at night and strip his vines of the grapes. He was recommended to install a sound deterrent or an automatic shotgun recording machine but obviously as there were other properties in the vicinity, he couldn't get permission to do this. I suspect that short of erecting a very tall fence there is probably little you can do unfortunately unless you can discover some other kind of nasty smelling deterrent which you can hang on adjacent fences to discourage them from visiting.

My large pest came in the form of a cat from a new neighbour, now i could not hurt a cat but when it uses my border as a toilet steps had to be taken, so the next best thing was a menacing looking concrete ornamental cat from the garden center. Job done not seen it since.