This spring she was in K-Mart and spotted an inexpensive form of the blue Tidy Bowl gizmo that you hang in the toilet tank at about $.50 apiece. Desperate to solve her deer problem she bought a few and hung them in places she wished to protect. Deer damage stopped.

Feeling brave she then planted a row of begonias along the front of the house and placed several of these blue toilet sanitizers just under the pine straw mulch. No deer damage to date after two months. Other nearby gardeners are now trialing her discovery with reported good results.

This idea is worth posting for a larger group to experiment with and report observations.

Thanks, Nandina! I'll trial this in clients' yards with hungry deer herds this fall & let you know how it went.

~Martie

Since fencing my yard was not a practical option I tried a number of folk remedies including moth balls, hot pepper, "Not Tonight Deer", etc. As far as I could tell, none had any long term effect and the munching continued.

The day before I ordered my Ouzi and camos, I attended a Spring plant day organized by my local Cooperative Extension and picked up a couple of newsletters. One had a very simple remedy for a deer repellent in it.

Damage was beginning to escalate since I apparently had the tastiest selection in the neighborhood. I decided to try the repellent recipe. I bought one and one half dozen eggs and cracked them into a bowl. I beat them enough to break the yolks and mixed the white and the yolk thoroughly.

I stretched a piece of cheesecloth over the mouth of a jumbo size mayonnaise jar and held it in place with a large rubber band (final container has to hold a little more than two quarts of liquid). I poured the eggs through the cheese cloth. The cheese cloth caught the big slimy bits and I threw it away. I added two quarts of water to the beaten eggs in the jar and mixed them together. I used a funnel to pour the egg mixture into a cleaned out Windex sprayer (any sprayer that can be adjusted to spray a mist can be used) and sprayed every plant in my yard, leaves and all.

I didn't drench the plant, I just tried to leave a light coating on most of it up to the height of a tall deer. I refilled the bottle and kept spraying until I used all the egg mixture up.

I swear I had no more deer damage at all the whole summer. This stuff lasted through rain just fine and I have not reapplied it.

Why did this work? Well, the guy who submitted the recipe said he thinks it's because deer have a very keen sense of smell and rotting eggs don't smell very good. The smell to humans is very faint to begin with and non existent after several days. I did not have to reapply for the same reason you have to scrub so hard to get eggs out of pans . . . egg really sticks and it's hard to wash off! I also applied it on a clear day and the egg had a good few days to dry and get adheared before it rained. I should point out that dried eggs are the basis of "Not Tonight Deer" but I found it very expensive and hard to mix and apply.

The man who submitted the recipe has a commercial Christmas tree grove and suffered costly and unsightly damage to his trees every year until he tried this. He sprayed only the surrounding outside row of trees and claims that three years later deer still avoid his trees to the point that they won't walk past the smelly outside trees to get to the untreated inside trees.

Sorry to write such a long answer but I wanted to be clear on how to try this. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to this guy as he really saved my whole yard and garden. I wanted to pass it on. Its such a wonderful solution . . . it's organic, it's earth friendly, it's long lasting, it's cheap and it does not involve hurting or injuring the deer.