|
Hi Annette,
I don't really know if there is any completely effective way of keeping them out. I know that we've probably discussed this problem on this thread, and I know that a few of us discussed it on another thread about 3 years ago. In our own case, we have a pair of Northern Harriers nesting on our farm, so rabbits don't tend to come up into the open areas of our yard around the gardens. Even as it is, the pair of resident hawks, plus assorted other hawks that work the skies over the farm manage to catch quite a few, so the rabbits keep to the forest.
As for the deer, I've heard quite a few people say that human urine keeps them away about the best of anything... Nice, eh? I was watching an organic gardening show on a PBS station a couple of years ago and the people who owned one of the seed companies that they visited place a few concrete blocks around the perimeter of their vegetable garden and put urine on those. They say it works better than anything else there is. I haven't had enough deer trouble here to bother doing something like that. The deer in our fields seem to have enough to eat back in the fields -- we have a lot of trefoil (a legume forage crop) and that's their usual target. If you have a little patch of land that you can use as a place to divert the deer to, you might try seeding it with some trefoil (should be available at any feed & seed store). The deer love it and it regrows quickly, so they shouldn't be able to decimate it before moving on to attack the spinach and lettuce in the garden.
Our biggest problem is with groundhogs and red squirrels. The groundhogs really like to go after the squash and often eat them off when they are just a couple of inches across. The red squirrels tear up the tomatoes and the ripe strawberries. Fortunately, my neighbours now have 3 cats that love to hunt squirrels, so I haven't seen even one out in our yard in about a year (there used to be about a dozen or so). This year, our new collie is making her presence known in the yard, so I have a feeling that the groundhogs will be keeping a very low profile this summer.
good luck with your pest troubles...
Croc
|
