Deer fence: Keeping deer out of the garden

I love seeing things like this during the winter months. These photos were taken from my upstairs office window, looking down towards our side yard. What you’re looking at are deer tracks coming from our unfenced front yard towards our backyard. As you can see, the tracks do a brief meander before the deer decided to do a U-turn (see lower right of photo) after realizing there wasn’t anywhere else to go! Yes!! That’s because we put up a deer fence surrounding our little orchard (see upper left corner of 2nd photo), our water garden room (where the arbor gate is, which I have blocked off for the winter) and completely fenced off the backyard. In the old days, they would just hop over our 4-foot-tall field fence and make themselves at home in our garden. That was sooo annoying!

So I just wanted to give you a quick update on how our deer fence is working. We hated to have to put it up since it’s visible — particularly against the white snow — but sometimes you have to be practical about keeping critters out of the garden, right?

We kept the field fence in place, then my husband Bill added a rebar rod to extend the height of the metal fence posts. At that point, we attached 3 1/2 feet of heavy-duty plastic wire deer fencing above the field fence and secured it in place with zip-ties.

It’s working great year-round: no moose, no dogs and especially no deer get in to the areas we’re trying to protect. So far, so good… Oh, and if you’re wondering about the larger tracks in the snow, those were from our friendly Avista guy! He’s pretty harmless.  ;o)