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Thank you all for your suggestions. It sounds like fencing is the answer. I am not sure the 3S (Shoot, Serve, Shut up.)method would even work. There are limits to how much meat even my crowd of carnivores can eat and we only have one freezer. I know there are at least five deer going through there, I have seen four at one time and that did not include the buck I saw at another time.

Bear in mind, we have not closed yet and these observations are from short visits we make in passing. We may also have raccoons and/or bunnies for all I know.

There is also a product called Defender, or something like that, by Sweeney that works wonders on pesky deer. It’s a little cannister that sits on a wire in your garden and it really keeps the deer out of my roses. I believe it contains dried blood, but the cannister keeps water out of it so it doesn’t wash away. Non toxic and lasts a full year.

I planted a rose bed in fron of my hous (see my home page) and the deer ate every flower off it the bushes the first night they were in the ground. I putt p those little cannisters, and they’ve never touched the flowers agai. They also keep away from my tulips during tulip season.

There are other things you can plant in your veggie garden that help keep the pests away — onions, marigolds, alliums, daffodils. Look for deer resistent plants and plant them around the edges of your more attractive plants. They will keep the deer away, except in the dead of winter when there is no other food. Then the deer will eat anything. :)

Last winter, the deer broke into my garden — broke the gate. Then they didn’t know how to get out (the wire fence was invisible to them at night). So, they leapt at the fence and bent it all out of shape. I had big pooches in it leading from inside to out. So, after my husband fixed all the wire, I hung strips of blaze orange plastic tape all along the edges of the fence to flap in the breeze and to let them know that it’s there. I’ve had no further trouble.

If you have deer you will almost certainly have rabbits and raccoons. That’s another reason for the “buried” chicken wire. It seems that they give up once they try a few places - because they don’t know how far down (or out) to dig. We haven’t had a groundhog since we did the buried fencing-but we see them all over the neighbors yards. They are like cockroaches around here.

The only reason I got a few bunnies was because I was lazy about putting the chicken wire tight to the yard fencing and zipping it together in a couple of places. A few found some low gaps and hopped through the yard fencing while they were still tiny. I have most of it fixed, and will fine tune it after we strip the garden next week. At one point we had three generations of bunnies hopping all over our back yard.

Season here is about done.