The ultimate deer-terrent
By Lisa Timpf
Once summer started approaching, it was time to turn my attention to the great outdoors – which includes, in our case, the modest orchard we have developed over the past few years.
Okay, so “orchard” is probably an overstatement. What we actually have is about a dozen fruit trees, mostly apple.
It’s a good thing for me that gardening is a hobby, not something I rely on in order to be able to feed myself. Thus far, the “orchard” has, in the course of seven years, provided a total yield of four edible Spartans – but boy, did those four apples, fresh picked off the tree, taste good!
Though we started out with three Spartan apple trees and two pear trees, two years ago we decided to expand the apple tree repertoire by adding a Honey Crisp and two Courtland trees.
I blame a co-worker who originally hails from Owen Sound for introducing me to the sweet and irresistible taste of Honey Crisp apples. Based on my observations, this sweetness goes beyond the apples themselves, if the behaviour of the local deer population is any indication.
While the Spartan trees, having had longer to establish themselves, now endure only the odd nibble here and there, the poor Honey Crisp tree has been the beneficiary of substantial deer depredation. The situation is so bad that at the start of the spring it looked less like a tree and more like a spindly twig with a few tentative offshoots. Its tiny branches look barely strong enough to carry blossoms, let alone apples.
I will confess to mixed feelings about my deer visitors. I actually enjoy seeing hoofprints around the property – especially tiny fawn-sized ones. However, enough is enough – my liking for Honey Crisp apples outweighs my desire to keep up sterling relations with our wildlife neighbours.
In an effort to improve the situation, I recently delved into one of my resource books, Deerproofing Your Yard and Garden by Rhonda Massingham Hart (an appropriate surname for someone writing about this topic).
Armed with information gleaned from this book, we’ve set up some sticks around the tree (apparently deer don’t like to put their heads between sticks, wary of traps), strung up some cloth strips to flap in the breeze and hopefully scare away would-be snackers, and have taken to putting tufts of dog hair around the base of the Honey Crisp apple tree, as deer apparently don’t like the smell of predators (if my Border Collie is reading this she will understand why the frequency of brushings she receives have substantially increased of late).
Another suggested precaution is to plant heavily scented herbs nearby, so we’ve transplanted some chives to the “orchard” area.
Finally, the author of the deerproofing book suggests strongly-scented soap. Soap bars can either be hung in the tree still in the package (the recommended practice is to drill a hole in the soap bar and string it up in the tree with a rope), or unwrapped and placed in cheesecloth bags or old nylons and suspended from branches. We elected to purchase Irish Spring, in hopes that it would provide, to paraphrase the commercial, “long, long lasting deer-odorant protection.”
With all these measures in place, the fruit tree area is far from a thing of beauty. On the plus side, even if our harvest doesn’t improve this year, we should have one of the most fragrant orchards around…
