Previously, I wrote about dealing with deer from my home in the woods in eastern PA. If you read that post, you know it was hard-won experience — every single daylily flower eaten in one day, munching on shrubs in the winter including Chinese holly when there was plenty of food in the nearby woods and deer that had quietly graduated from browsing the tree limbs to helping themselves to whatever struck their fancy.
Since then, we’ve moved. We sold the property and landed in a small town where the deer seem content to stay out of our yard. I get to enjoy my daylily flowers and mums. And, I genuinely don’t miss the deer.
Even though we seem to have escaped, the problem is just as real for suburban gardeners as it ever was for me in the country. And September is the worst time of year for it.
As natural food sources thin out heading into fall, deer shift into serious feeding mode — building fat reserves before winter. Many of the plants you planted for fall color, especially mums, is exactly what they want right now.
If deer have been a problem in your garden all season, brace yourself. It tends to get worse before it gets better.
What Doesn’t Work as Well as You’d Hope
Scare tactics — pie plates, scarecrows, ultrasonic devices, motion-activated sprinklers — are worth trying, but don’t count on them for long. Suburban deer have seen it all. They’re remarkably unimpressed. Whatever you use, you’ll need to rotate it, because they’ll figure out what they can safely ignore within a matter of days.
The image below if of a deer at our home. We are in our basement family room watching TV. This youngster was not all concerned even when we started to move around the room.
Home remedies like soap, human hair, and coyote urine are similarly unreliable. Some gardeners swear by them. Others find the deer barely pause. The honest answer is that results vary enormously and none of them are consistent enough to trust as your primary defense. When it comes to daylilies I found that very little kept them away. They are like candy to deer.
What Actually Helps
Scent repellents - specifically Liquid Fence and Repel-All - can work. The critical word is can. When I was dealing with deer on my old property these products would work for a time and kept them off my favorite plants.
But the moment I missed a week or stopped rotating between products, they were right back at the daylilies. If you decide on this route, you need to reapply after every rain without exception and rotate between products. The labor involved is real and it never stops. Unfortunately, with my busy schedule, this just wasn’t a viable solutions for us.
Plant selection helps over time. Deer tend to avoid plants with strong fragrance, fuzzy or coarse texture, or toxic compounds. Russian sage, catmint, lavender, bee balm, salvia, and ornamental grasses are reliably passed over in most gardens. For annuals, marigolds, zinnias, snapdragons, lantana, and verbena hold up well. On the other hand: hostas, daylilies, tulips, impatiens, and arborvitae are on the menu regardless of what anyone tells you. No plant is truly deer-proof when they’re hungry enough – remember my Chinese holly experience.
Containers on a raised deck or porch are a smarter solution than most people realize. While it is a myth that deer don’t climb steps, they do tend to avoid them. So you can try some of your favorite plants in containers on a raised deck or porch. If there are other things for them to eat, they probably won’t climb to get them.
A fence is the only truly reliable non-animal solution. The requirements are non-negotiable: 7 to 8 feet high minimum, heavy steel or wooden poles (plastic collapses under a 200-pound deer), netting staked firmly to the ground so fawns can’t crawl under. It’s a significant investment, but for serious deer pressure it’s the only thing that actually holds.
The One Thing I’d Do First
If we hadn’t moved, there’s one thing I would have done before anything else.
I would have gotten another big dog.
We never really had a big problem with deer until our dog died. We had him for 12 years. In all that time, the deer kept their distance — browsing the tree limbs on their way past, mostly leaving the garden alone. His presence, his scent, his marking of the territory changed the calculation entirely for them.
When he was gone, the relationship changed almost immediately.
A dog that lives in and around your garden is the most effective deer deterrent most gardeners will ever have — and the most overlooked. Not everyone can have one. But if you can, and deer are a genuine problem, it’s worth thinking about seriously
The Bigger Picture
I’ve always had a live-and-let-live approach to wildlife. I’d rather share than fight. But I have my limits - and when the deer start every daylily flower on the property when there's plenty of food in the woods nearby is definitely my limit.
The goal isn’t to eliminate them. It’s to establish boundaries. Protect what matters most, use the strategies above on your favorite plants, and accept that some browsing is just part of gardening where deer live.
You can read my original post with the full story of what happened on the country property here: therelaxedgardener.com/blogs/gardeningsimplified/dealing-with-deer
And if you’ve found something that works in your garden, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. This is one of those topics where real gardener experience is worth more than any advice a Google search yields.
