This is my deer and bunny-proof fence.
No chemical deterrents for me–just eight, 5-foot tall poles [plus a telephone pole] and yards and yards of chicken coop wire, which was rolled from one starting point [the telephone pole] to an end point [telephone pole] where three nails act as an anchor to close the “door.” We are not handy people but my spouse and I managed to fashion a “door” by stapling a slat of wood to the end of the wire and using that as a sturdy base for closing the circle.
My deer-proof pen is a pain in the neck. Who wants to have to unhook a mass of wire from a telephone pole in order to check on whether the snap peas are anywhere near producing a pod or to dump fresh compost on the tomato bed-to-be. But there’s no other solution. I know those deer love to gobble up my garden, especially the tomato plants. Last summer, whenever a tomato plant sent shoots through the chicken wire, the leaves were nibbled to the nub by morning. The first year of the fence, when the hub and I amortized its cost ($30 or so) into our tomato yield (a poor harvest), we figured our tomatoes were coming in at $3.50 a piece. But now we’re into year three of the fence and good crop or poor, we’re doing a lot better.
We took the fence down the first year–furled the wire around the posts and tucked it into the garage. But setting it up the next year was awkward and difficult. Now we leave it in place–a dramatic wintry object in a snow storm.
Hurdles aside, our fence works. The deer come by and sniff–we’ve seen them in early morning or at dusk–but so long as we keep the tomato plants to the center of the plot and not along its edges, our crop is safe. And, since the chicken wire is set snug to the ground, the bunnies can’t get in for snacks, either.
