I like the bleach spray idea. Easy and can't hurt! And I must know what you use as a "garden sprayer." Just the regular little Deer Off or Bug spray bottle not much bigger than a Windex bottle? Recently I went to the local nursery and asked if they had some industrial sized spray dealie I could really blast the area with deer repellent clouds with instead of squirt squirt squirt until your hand gets tired, a few leaves or blossoms at a time. I mean, we have an unbeLEEVable number of deer, it's frightening. And they aren't afraid any more. And they like Deer Off now. And eat things they would never have eaten a few years ago. And appear 7, 8 at a time in my yard and when I start yelling, looking placidly at me through the window almost nose to nose, and when I run out to chase them, stand and stare me down until I stop first, it's so unsettling to have animals that size just stand there and look at you. They will eventually leave, but you do have to make a big fuss to make them do more than amble off in no hurry at all.
Oh, I got off the track and started ventilating about the deer scourge. I'm trying ONE MORE TIME to have a garden. I'm using chemicals, though, as I say, they get used to them. I'd like a garden sprayer that is big and automatic, but the best I've found is the hand-spritzer that comes with a product called Deer Solutions. It's organic and harmless (very expensive, because you use a lot) and the deer so far seem not to like the taste. But the guy told me you have to keep changing products, maybe once a month, because they get used to them and grow to like them, even really noxious ones.
I bought something that came wrapped in tons of bubble wrap. I got the bright idea of spreading it around the main (very contracted, out of discouragement) areas in which I"m trying to have flowers, thinking the *pops* as they walked on it would scare them. My hubby points out that it will kill the grass unless I take it up every morning. I"m also spreading Milorganite, which I do believe is Milwaukee sewage! nice! around to discourage them. It seems not to smell awful to humans the way it did last time i tried it. Deer Off doesn't do a darn thing. Neither do hanging bars of (hotel) soap or human hair.
I've come to really, really hate deer. I don't even think they're pretty any more. Big rodents. They've eaten everything the last couple of years, stuff they never used to eat, thousands of dollars of perennials and shrubs, too, if you add it all up, down to the ground. Not to mention labor. Whole big bushes. Evergreens. I had thousands of daylilies, vast numbers of them, all gone, chewed down to the ground. My tulips! My daffodils! My alliums! My azaleas! Stuff I don't remember, except it sure was pretty. They've pushed (or pulled) over young lilac trees and stripped them. Holly shrubs that have very prickly leaves, devoured. Roses with thorns? Yum! All stuff soaked with repellent, or with systemic repellent granules in their earth that are supposed to make them unappetizing.
Don't bother advising me to shoot them, I'm not going to. If I can't manage them this year by trickery, I'm giving up.
So what kind of garden sprayer do you use? Do you have a link?
The bat story is funny. I was reading without my glasses on and had an odd moment of thinking you had written this: "And I felt just a little bit ridiculous standing in my yard peeing in the window..."
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