Fences, Liquid and Otherwise

Imagine for a moment that the third grade from your local elementary school stopped by to visit your garden – not just one class, but the entire third grade. Now, imagine that they all simultaneously upchucked in your garden. Tossed their cookies. All 200 of them. Got that imagine firmly in your head?

You now have an idea of what it is like to be around a fresh application of ‘Liquid Fence’. My apology for the graphic nature of the preceding paragraph, but the Internet does not yet have (at least not to my knowledge, anyway) a smell-sharing component and, if Steve Jobs is working on such an app, he would best put Liquid Fence on the ‘we-don’t-want-that-out-there’ list.

I write all this because, at seven o’clock this morning, Betty applied Liquid Fence to our garden. It took two gallons of spray to do everything. Early May is when the garden truly comes alive with hundreds of hosta and all manner of other tender shoots breaking the surface. These ‘tender shoots’, in turn, represent Sunday brunch at the Four Seasons for the local deer and rabbit population.

Bambi can eat a couple of thousand
dollars worth of plants in an hour.

After a few hours, the Liquid Fence dries and, to us humans, the smell becomes almost undetectable. To deer and rabbits, it remains not only detectable but extremely unpleasant. In my observation, even two weeks after application, deer walk up to a tasty plant and then walk away. (There are multiple brands out there that contain the same basic ingredients – putrescent egg solids and garlic. We have also used Bobbex with similar results.)

Liquid Fence and its ilk are not cheap. We buy gallon-sized jugs of concentrate that yield 16 gallons of sprayable product. That gallon jug bears a price tag of $126. At retail, those two gallons of spray cost $16.

But $16 is roughly the cost of one very nice hosta or two attractive perennials. In our yard, one deer could, in an hour’s time, munch through several thousand dollars worth of plants. In the case of our neighbors, each year the deer come through their yard and ‘lollipop’ a pair of very expensive evergreens grown in containers. Each spring, their landscaper replaces those evergreens at a cost of, say, $300 for the pair. The Liquid Fence starts looking cheap after a while.

This is a deer clearing a five-foot
fence.  As you can see, it did
so with room to spare.

At this time of year, because plants are growing rapidly, we will spray every two to three weeks. Come July, we’ll slow down to an application every month. We’ll spray once in November then let snow cover do the work over the course of the winter. That November application will fairly well empty out the gallon of concentrate.

The alternative is a deer fence. From a standing start, a deer can easily clear a three- or four-foot fence and nearby is a photo of one jumping over a five-foot fence. So, things called ‘deer fences’ are netting that rises eight to ten feet. They must encircle a property to be effective, which means your driveway now will have gates. The cost? A website called ‘Deerbusters’ offers a kit consisting of stakes and 100 feet of seven-and-a-half-foot fencing for $259. On that basis, deer-proofing our two acres would cost right around $3100. You can buy a lot of Liquid Fence for that kind of money.

R.I.P., Thomas Sanders Blue

He wasn’t even thirty inches high and he had barely settled in as part of the family. Finding him this morning, savagely mauled, I could only think of what might he might have become when he grew up. But he was a victim of pointless violence and a public mindset that those who killed him are themselves innocent victims and cannot be held responsible for their actions.


Picea glauca ‘Sanders Blue’, a dwarf Alberta spruce with bright slate-blue needles, came to us in March; a gift from a landscaper friend who spotted it at a specialty nursery. Apart from its striking appearance, the ‘Sanders’ moniker is also our own. The ‘Thomas’ name was always an inside joke. For years, some marketing list-maker has suffered under the delusion that there is a teenager named ‘Thomas’ living at out address, and we get a steady stream of mailed offers for SAT test prep and technical school enrollment. When Sanders Blue arrived, we decided that this must be the long-awaited ‘Thomas’ prophecied by our postal carrier.

Sanders Blue in the
Manhattan bed

The tag said Thomas would do best in full sun and there is only one spot on our property that meets that requirement. And so we pulled out some uninvited, self-seeded rudbeckia from the Manhattan bed and gave Thomas a fitting site, a bucket of compost, and ample water.

Our property abuts several square miles of town conservation watershed and that land is infested with deer. ‘Infested’ is not too strong a word. There are hundreds of them and, like most suburban towns around Boston, hunting is prohibited.

We deal with the deer two ways. When we see them on our property, we run, scream and throw rocks at them. Because the deer would otherwise retreat just a few feet into the woods, we make a point of pursuing them until they are several hundred yards from our property line. But this is only effective during daylight hours when we can see them, or when we are home.

Our second, and more effective line of defense is a product called Liquid Fence. During the gardening season, we mix up as many as three gallons of the stuff and spray it once a month on everything that we care about. Liquid Fence smells awful – its active ingredients are putrefied eggs and other nasty stuff – for about three hours. Then it dries and the smell goes away, or at least abates to the human nose. To deer, it continues to smell and taste unpleasant. It is sufficiently effective that we have watched deer nose up to a hosta, start to take a nibble, then back off.

The culprit, in a recent photo

The plan is that the deer learn to avoid us, passing down accumulated wisdom from generation to generation. (“Pay attention, Bambi. The people who live here are crazy. They yell and throw rocks and their plants taste terrible.”)

But, come mid-autumn, we let our guard down. The beds are cleared of perennial stalks then mulched in with leaves so there is little for any critter to eat. We fence the vulnerable evergreens and spray Liquid Fence once a month through the winter as the weather allows. Had we been more diligent, perhaps Thomas would have been spared. Then again, being out on the street made him visible – and therefore vulnerable - to the deer that populate our neighbors’ lawns and gardens.

The photo shows the extent of the damage. The deer ate not only the needles (which have no nutritional value) but also the bark. There is no recovery from such an attack. Thomas is a goner.

This weekend, I’ll dig him out and take the carcass to the compost pile at the back of the property. I’ll do so with a sense of resignation that a hunter with a bow and arrow might have saved Thomas. Or even a well-aimed rock.

Blame Walt Disney

What’s the most environmentally catastrophic film of all time? Some sci-fi thriller? Not a chance. The hands-down winner is ‘Bambi’. Four generations of children have now been indoctrinated with the notion that deer are wonderful little creature with big eyes and cute lashes, and that they eat nothing but tufts of spring grass. Your garden may say something different.

The impact of ‘Bambi’ can be seen in the numbers. The whitetail deer population of North America before the advent of European settlers is generally pegged at around 20 million. Hunting by Native Americans and the realities of harsh winters kept the number of deer stable. European settlers brought farms, urbanization, and a rising demand for venison and hides. The number of deer declined through the 18th and 19th centuries, reaching a trough of under a million whitetails by 1930 because of over-hunting and habitat destruction.

Then, along came ‘Bambi’. Every child in America recoiled in horror as Bambi’s mother was killed by hunters. Hunters were portrayed as evil people, creating forest fires and killing with abandon. Not content with bringing child audiences to tears in 1942, Disney re-released the film in 1947, 1957, 1966, 1975, 1982, and 1988 (and thereafter on home video so it could be watched in an endless loop).

Today, the whitetail deer population of the United States is estimated at 30 million – fifty percent above the pre-Columbian figure. Deer have learned to adapt – indeed, to thrive – in suburbia. There are fewer hunters (Bambicide!), no wolves, no predators of any kind.
Keeping out deer has created an arms race worthy of the Cold War. We have friends who have encircled their entire property with a ten-foot fence – and worry every time the driveway gate is left open for guests. Other friends believe in hanging scented soap from the branches of bushes. The deer eat the shrubbery and leave the soap alone.

Which brings me to our garden. We back up to a pond and border several square miles of town watershed. I estimate the local whitetail deer population at around half a million. I see them strolling the neighborhood, tasting the new, the flowering, and the beloved plants (the Latin name for ‘tulip’ translates as ‘deer candy’), leaving a fresh crop of deer ticks in their wake.
My wife and I keep deer at bay through a number of techniques. In the winter we fence the most delectable plants. Every month we apply a solution that, when sprayed on plants, smells as though the entire sixth-grade class of our local elementary school came down with stomach flu in our yard. It works. The smell (the base ingredient is putrefied eggs) fades to the human nose after a few hours but the scent lingers (to deer, anyway) for several weeks.

My wife plants native trees and shrubs that have developed their own deer defenses over the millennia. Our property abounds in blueberry, Clethra, Fothergilla, Itea, Leucothoe, Rhododendron and a host of other trees and shrubs that look glorious to humans but that the deer find unappetizing.

When we note the presence of deer in our yard, usually in the early morning, we run out screaming in robes and slippers, waving our arms. The deer retreat into the woods a few feet and watch us. We chase them and throw rocks at them (yes, I throw rocks at Bambi; so sue me). By continuing to chase them deep into the woods, we have caused an entire generation of deer (and neighbors) to believe that there are crazy people living on the street that are best avoided.

There is no present solution for the glut of deer. Declaring open season for hunters in densely populated suburbs isn’t going to happen for very good reasons. ‘Relocation’ has proven an abysmal failure. Birth control (via contraceptive darts) appears to work only in areas with a static population such as islands. Friends of Animals estimates that half a million deer are killed each year in collisions with automobiles. Sadly, disease and starvation due to a lack of food – both products of overpopulation – are what currently thin herds. It is indeed time for fresh thinking on the subject.

In the end, it’s a problem of our own making – our own changing sensibilities along with the creation of suburban gardens that act as feeding station… aided and abetted by Walt Disney.