Johnny, you are going to cause those deer to hate peanut butter.

I hope it works.

Down here in southern OK we have a lot of hungry deer in our rural area and they will jump electric fences (as well as every other kind of fence that is less than 8' tall). I can stand in my yard and watch them pick their way across pastures divided for grazing by electric fences...and they just go over them or under them. Maybe if the deer are only seeing your fence at night, they won't figure out there isn't a strand higher up than the one in the photo. Before we raised our garden fence to 8' in height, I used thin string or fishing line attached to poles 6' and 8' above the ground to trick the deer into thinking our 3' tall fence was 8' tall. It worked for a few years until a smart deer figured out it was just rope or fishing line. After that, the deer declared open season on the garden and we had to put up a sturdy, tall fence to keep them out. Obviously, with the size of your garden, that's not a viable option for you.

Dawn

Dawn,

If the current installation fails, here is plan B. See URL below.

I have found a few different variations on this fence design.

Here is a link that might be useful: Vermont slant deer fence

Johnny, I think plan B will work also. One year I thought I noticed fresh damage to my sweet potatoes, so I ran a wire zig zag across my sweet potatoes. My line of thought was that they may be able to jump high, but they cant fly. I assume that they may have jumped over the outer wire only to land on the next wire, what ever happened the damage stopped and I removed the inner wire after a couple of weeks. I live in an area where the deer don't have a lot of pressure for food. There is plenty of woods, pasture, water and many people feed the wildlife.

Here is another proven fence design.

Here is a link that might be useful: Deer control

Johnny, I believe Plan B is likely to work. For a few years, we kept the deer mostly out of the garden by having two fences, the outer one three feet tall and the inner one four feet tall. The inner fence was spaced either 3 or 4' from the outer fence, leaving an area between the two fences that was just wide enough to deter the deer. This were based on the knowledge that deer can jump high, deer can jump wide, but deer cannot jump high and wide at the same time. Being a gardener, though, I couldn't leave an empty "moat" of bare soil (or weeds) between the two fences, so I planted flowers there. Of course, the deer often reached over the 3' fence and ate the flowers, but they couldn't or at least wouldn't eat the veggies that were growing safely behind the second fence. It was similar to the last fence design you linked, only we just had woven wire fencing instead of electric fencing.

We built the garden in 1999. For the first couple of years, it only had a 3' tall fence but the deer didn't bother it that much. Once they started reaching over the fence and eating, we put up the inner fence. That worked until maybe 2007 or 2008. Some smart deer figured out it could jump the outer fence in a sort of sideways hop and land within the "moat" of flowers growing between the two fences. Then, one more sideways hop and it was in the big garden with the veggies. So, I put up the string to trick the deer into thinking the fence was taller, and I tied white grocery store type plastic bags at about eye level to one strand of the string "fence". I was hoping the white bags moving in the wind would look like a white deer tail signaling danger. It seemed to work okay during the day but not so much at night. So, eventually, we raised the height of the fence.

Since raising the fence height to 8', we have only had deer in the garden if some forgetful person failed to close and latch the gate.

I have seen fence designs similar to your plan B fence, including in a Texas Landscaping book that I had. I showed that one to our neighbor who lives west of our back property line. His place is the only house between us and the Red River and he has both deer and copperhead snakes in such huge numbers that it is mind-boggling. Our deer and snake problems are small compared to his.

I have observed over the years that the deer don't bother my garden plants so much in the good times when natural food is available, but in the drought years they will go to extremes to reach whatever they can find. In 2011, a friend of a friend of ours had two starving deer climb into a box trap used to trap feral hogs. It is hard to imagine one deer climbing into that confined space, much less two, but whatever he had in that trap to lure in the hogs also lured in those hungry deer.

Because I am stubborn and pig-headed and want to get the most production possible from my garden space, I grow climbing plants on my 8' tall fence---everything from southern peas like Red Ripper to all kinds of pole beans, vining cucumbers, and winter squash. Inevitably, the deer chew on everything that is on the deer side of the fence, but on the inside of the fence, I still get plenty of harvest. They mostly only nibble foliage and not so much the stems or flowers. I often mix in morning glories randomly here and there because the deer avoid them most of the time, and often don't eat the plants interplanted with the morning glories on the fence.

I still have trouble with coons climbing the fence and getting into the corn, but have mostly put a halt to that by growing a wide border (not so wide I cannot step over it) of milk thistle around the corn. There's not much that seems to deter the coons, but milk thistle's prickly leaves do. I start the milk thistle plants inside and transplant them into the ground to get them a head start so that they'll be big enough to keep the coons out by the time we have ripening ears of corn. The only drawback to milk thistle is that it much have very well drained soil and lower rainfall. In a year with heavier rainfall, the plants rot off right at the soil surface.

Keep us posted on how the fence works for you.

Dawn

Dawn and Larry,

Thanks for the help. I'll keep you posted on how our fence works.