The Deer Repellent Organic Garden

Keep Deer Off Your Plants by Growing This Offensive Mix

Sep 15, 2008

Good deer control methods start with prevention. Stop deer damage in your organic garden by growing plants that deer rarely browse.

Many garden experts agree that the best way to stop deer damage in the landscape is by installing 8-foot deer fencing around the garden or property. However, few people desire or can afford this extreme option. Other deer repellents are hit-and-miss experiments. Many home remedies, such as dangling bars of soap or human hair, result in nothing but frustrated gardeners and a path of nibbled shoots where plants once thrived.

An alternative repellent exists in the leaves and stems of the garden plants themselves. There is a surprisingly large list of plants that deer seldom browse, and you can deter deer by making these the foundation of your ornamental organic garden.

Annuals

Every flower garden needs some annuals for instant color, long-lasting bloom, and to fill gaps where plants unexpectedly died. As soon as you can work the soil, plant some sweet alyssum and some snapdragons for color and fragrance. Sweet alyssum also attracts many pollinators and beneficial insects, so you’re creating a good garden dynamic for your summer plants.

When temperatures heat up, include some vinca, dusty miller, flowering tobacco, strawflower, and spider flowers. Besides their renowned resistance to deer, these plants thrive with little supplemental watering.

Bulbs

Bulbs have a nasty reputation for providing forage for many animals when few other plants are blooming in the early spring garden. However, daffodils, snowdrops, and bluebells herald the end of winter without sounding the dinner bell for deer. Alliums and crown imperial continue the show well into late spring. Apply an organic fertilizer rich in phosphorus that favors root development when planting bulbs, such as bone meal.

Groundcovers

Groundcovers can’t do their job of covering a barren area where few things grow if a horde of deer have made this patch their nightly pit stop. If you don’t mind plants with an invasive tendency, you can plant bishop’s weed, bugle weed, or lily of the valley in partly shady areas of the garden. Lamium, or dead nettle, has slightly better manners, but gardeners may still need to keep it in check with an annual thinning.

Herbs

Vegetable gardens usually suffer the worst casualties in the deer-ravaged organic garden, but that doesn’t mean you can never have success with edibles. Deer turn their noses up at the scent of many pungent herbs, including anise, mint, oregano, lemon balm, marjoram, rosemary, sage, tarragon, and thyme. Incorporate a great deal of compost into your herb garden, as they can’t tolerate poorly drained soil.

Ornamental Grasses

Gardeners that admire the structural beauty and movement that ornamental grasses impart to the garden can celebrate, as deer pass over most of these plants. Furthermore, ornamental grasses require very little upkeep other than weeding and a spring haircut. Consider growing blue fescue, feather reed grass, fountain grass, northern sea oats, or pampas grass in your garden.

Perennials

For the shady perennial garden, you can grow the nearly deer-proof bleeding heart, corydalis, forget-me-not, or lungwort. In sunny spots, you can grow false indigo, lamb’s ear, monkshood, ligularia, small globe thistle, and threadleaf coreopsis. Add a 3-inch layer of organic mulch to condition the soil, and divide any plants that become crowded or gangly.

The copyright of the article The Deer Repellent Organic Garden in Organic Flower Gardens is owned by Jamie McIntosh. Permission to republish The Deer Repellent Organic Garden in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.