Several weeks ago, we noticed that despite our efforts up til that point (ie. a four foot fence), that deer were still gaining access to one of our gardens. They were unfortunately helping themselves to the green leaves of our beets which ended up making the yield lower. When they tired of beets, they moved on to the sweet potato greens next.

Frustrated, having spent hard earned resources on the now impotent fence, I looked for other options. Do a google search and you’ll find some pretty strange solutions from CD’s to human hair, etc. I had recently been given some deer and rabbit repellent in a small spray bottle but there was no way that would cover the entire garden area. Further, we didn’t know if we really wanted to spray that stuff on something we were going to eat. After some research, we discovered that the Deer and Rabbit repellent version of Liquid Fence was just natural ingredients like eggs, garlic, pepper, etc. More on that in a second.

Earlier in the summer, we ventured into using Fish Emulsion as a natural, organic fertilizer. This was the recommended product of the producers of much of our seed stocl. It’s good stuff as fertilizer, but boy does it stink! See where we’re going with this? 😉

So because we apply the fish emulsion every other week or so, we decided to add some of the liquid fence into the mix and put it all in a sprayer to make it easier to mist the leaves of the plants that the deer were becoming fond of, and also side dress the other crops. The combination of these two ingredients would likely raise the dead to life  it’s that potent! If you value your neighborly relationships – use wisely! We found that after letting it sit in the sprayer for two weeks, it’s even MORE potent. We hope we’ve not ruined hunting season for our area hunters by sending all the deer away.

The benefits of this are two fold 1) critter repellent and 2) fertilization. Adding the two together assures that we keep the smelly stuff coming as often as the fertilizer and provides compelling reasons to go out every two weeks to do both. Drop the ball on the fertilizing, and you not only make the plants suffer, but weaken their defenses against critters. It’s proven to be a valuable symbiotic relationships thus far.

As a side note – we also picked up some bath soap from a surplus-sort of store for $.40/bar or so. We cut these in half, drilled holes in them, then hung them on every fence post. The combination of these two things has given our garden a welcome break from deer, rabbits, even children ;-). If they continue to work so well, we may try going fenceless next year!

If you’ve got your own recipe for some world-class anti-critter stink, post it in the comments so we can try it!