TOPIC: Deer control

Something has been eating the leaves off my nice 4 prongs.... Thinking it is the deer. Do you guys do anything for pest control?

I am thinking soap and hair?

The only thing I've found that works in reality for me is an electric fence system. The fence I used to us was as high as I could get it -about five feet or so. I used a battery system for the woods, a ground stake, and ran 7 wires. Bottom and top hot..and alternate them.

Even with the fence, you need to keep the juicy looking stuff inside the fence looking worse than the stuff outside or they will jump over. Jewel weed was the big key for me

Also, don't use a wimpy charger. Deer are hard to shock. I used a full ParMak unit suitable for cattle.

When I had a garden in West Virginia and was having trouble with the Deer eating my' crops, I had good luck with sprinkling Copper Dragon and Sevin Dust all around and 2 or 3 Aluminum Pie forms (the cheapy thin Aluminum ones you buy at the store) hung together from tree limbs or poles in several locations. When they bang together in the wind, Deer get pretty skiddish and usually stay away. You can also make human silhouettes (with arms out) out of plywood and place them where your' Ginseng plots are. This also seems to help.


Frank

The foil pie tins have been used successfully to deter turkey and deer and they are cheap. There are \"deer repellent\" products that are OMRI listed (organic) as well. There are tons of deer in my area. Aside from fencing off my wild transplants in seed production areas, it's not cost effective or time efficient for me with the amount of area planted. They start to hit the ginseng hard this time of year, every year. But they always come back

I heard that this works, from last year's seminar in Ashville. I must say that while we are going to try this, we have not yet done so.

The key seems to be having entrances to your growing areas, which implies that the rest of the area is fenced or blocked somehow.

Lie down 10' of 1x1 chicken wire at the patch entrances. The presenter of this [don't have his name handy here at work] said that the wire really bothers deer hooves, and they will not walk over it. Gotta be long, as they can jump!

I used barbed wire, It doesn't work 100% since the deer sometimes jump it, but the damage has gone way down. This of course only works if it's on your own land.

Dog hair has worked for us and we have a whole lot of deer. Mice type critters cause alot more damage by eating the seeds.

guy