Category: Garden

Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.

Post #G21-058: Nuts, peppers, and storing up for winter. Part 2: Peppers

 

This is the gardening post I started to write yesterday.  We’ve finally hit full fall conditions here in Northern Virginia, with frost or near-frost conditions each night.  So this is a post about a few final things I learned in this year’s gardening.

In a nutshell:

  • If you are planting sweet potatoes, plant lots of slips, rather than counting on the spreading of the vines to fill your beds.
  • Radiant barrier works well to extend the fall season of low-to-the-ground crops such as lettuce.
  • Might as well plant what survives well, rather than struggle to keep ill-suited crops alive.

Sweet potato nuances:  In times of famine …

“In times of famine, we’d be glad to have that.”  That’s the polite phrase my wife uses when I pull some undesirable bit of produce out of the garden.

It’s far nicer than “who in their right mind would eat that”, yet makes the same point.  It can be said equally of the undesirable (e.g., eggplant), the ludicrously undersized (e.g., pinky-sized carrots), and the only-partially-edible (e.g., spade-marked potatoes).

But before I diss the sweet potato as mere famine-food, let me sing its praises.  As far as I can tell, it needs absolutely no care whatsoever, other than keeping it watered until it gets established.  It grows like a weed, covering its beds and shading out any actual weeds.  It puts out lovely little morning-glory-type flowers (as it is in the same family as morning glory).  It produces a lot of calories per square foot.  You can plant it beneath taller plants (such as sunflowers or peppers) and it’ll cover the ground beneath and produce tubers.  And harvest is easy — peel back the vines, scrape the soil, and you’ll see the tops of the sweet potatoes, ready to be pulled.

The yield of calories per square foot is only slightly lower than potatoes (per this reference).  If I’ve done the metric-to-ridiculous conversion correctly, that works out to just about 100 edible calories per square foot for either of them.

I learned one important thing about sweet potato cultivation this year:  Plant lots of slips.

This year, I grew them on a lark.  I had a few store-bought sweet potatoes that had gotten moldy, and I decided to try to grow slips from them rather than just toss them.  One out of three moldy potatoes yielded slips. But I figured it wouldn’t matter, as they would spread, and could be easily propagated by cutting the ends of vines and re-planting them.

So I started with just a handful of slips, and I let those spread to fill out the allotted portions of the beds.  I had heard that the vines would put out sweet potatoes wherever they set down roots, as they spread out.  I figured that I’d end up with a bed full of sweet potatoes, despite starting with just a few plants.

That was a mistake.  Sure, the vines will put out additional sweet potatoes as they spread.  But each vine only puts out big sweet potatoes at the original rooting spot for that vine.  As it went along, it produced additional sweet potatoes at various nodes along the vine.  But all of those “secondary” sweet potatoes were much smaller.  

Here’s my harvest, from about 50 square feet of raised beds.  (The hammer is  there to give a sense of scale.)

By weight, I ended up with a roughly 60/40 mix of sweet potatoes of the size you’d see in the store, and sweet potatoes of the “in times of famine” variety.  Large enough that they’re probably worth the effort of peeling and eating.  But only just.

The moral of the story?  In my climate (Zone 7), plant lots of slips.  You can grow them the lazy way, by planting a few slips and letting the vines run to cover the allotted bed space.  But you don’t want to.  That gives you a few good-sized sweet potatoes, and a whole lot of undersized ones.  I’d have done far better to have had three times as many slips, and kept the vines one-third as long.

Would I plant these again?  You bet.  I’m just going to plant them a little smarter next year.  Stick them in the ground in the spring.  Come back in the fall and harvest a significant amount of food.  That’s pretty hard to argue with.

Radiant barrier for late lettuce.

In April (Post #G21-018), I tested the idea of using a radiant barrier to keep raised beds warm at night.  And by tested, I mean tested.  I used data loggers to track temperatures overnight in beds with and without a radiant barrier cover.  The cover raised the bed temperatures by about 10F.

In Virginia, 10F should add about a month to the growing season.  In Vienna, VA, over the past 30 years, the median date at which nighttime temperatures reached 22F or lower was roughly December 8.  Compared to an expected first-frost date in the first week of November.

So, this fall, I’m putting that to use.  Beneath the radiant barrier above is a small patch of lettuce.  So far, practice validates theory.  My lettuce is still alive despite a couple of frosts so far this week.  I hope to grow that lettuce — albeit slowly (Post #G21-055) — into December.

In the end, I’m not sure this is any less effort than a hoop-house style greenhouse, set atop the bed.  (PVC pipes bent into semi-circles, anchored to the ground, and covered with clear plastic sheet.)  But I already own the pieces of radiant barrier, cut to size.  So radiant barrier it is.  It works.

Final harvest before winter:  Peppers and other stragglers.

With frost coming, I did that garden ritual of picking absolutely everything that was left in the garden.  That yielded the artfully arranged jumble you see above.  Or the more orderly view of the same pile, below.

This year, overwhelmingly, what was left was peppers.  Green to the left, banana to the right, cayenne at the top.  (The cayennes are green, but in theory they will turn red now that they’ve been picked.)

I’m ambivalent about peppers.  They don’t produce a lot of calories.  But they pickle well, they’re OK in salads, and they have the outstanding advantage of taking care of themselves.  Nothing around here seems to bother them much.

The lesson learned here is that I didn’t start out to have a pepper-heavy garden.  With the exception of the eggplant and beans, these are the long-term survivors of what I planted back in the spring/early summer.  With the lesson being that if I’m aiming for the best yield per unit of effort, maybe I need to change my attitude toward a family of produce that manages to last the whole year with no effort on my part.

Concluding remarks for the 2021 gardening year.

At the end of 2021, the only things left growing are some lettuce, and some garlic that I planted for harvest next year.  So now’s a good time to recap and tentatively plan for what I’ll grow next year.

Non-food crops:  Sunflowers, marigolds, zinnias.  These are nice for taking up the odd corners of the garden and attracting bees.  Zero upkeep other than watering the sunflowers in the driest part of the year.  The sunflowers require serious deer deterrents.  But they look nice, they feed the bird and the bees.  So why not grow them again.

Low-maintenance starchy root crops:  Potatoes, sweet potatoes.  Those are both a definite yes for next year.  So far those have been zero maintenance with good yield.  Fresh potatoes tasted particularly good.  I won’t bother with fingerling potatoes (turned out way too small).  I’ll plan to fill a bed with sweet potato slips, rather than count on the spread of the vines to fill the bed.

Tomatoes:  Yes, but.  I will continue to “follow the rules” as I did this year, including staking and trimming.  But I need to stagger the plantings by month so that I have them coming in all year.  I have a least-effort process for making small batches of tomato sauce down cold (Post #G21-046).  But if I’m going to end up making sauce, I should just go ahead and plant Romas or similar, as that should be much more energy-efficient (Post #G21-046).  The home-dried tomatoes were a big hit, so I will definitely do that again next year.  Given that, it’s well worth working out a practical way to do that with solar energy, in my humid climate (Post #G21-050).

Cucumbers and summer squash.  I’m going to give those a pass next year.  I expected these to be mainstays of my garden.  Instead, after one year of bliss, they turned out to be nothing but trouble.  I how have a garden area infested with cucumber beetles and targeted by squash vine borers.  I may consider growing parthenocarpic (self-fertile, no-bees-needed) cucumbers under netting.  But honestly, once you reach that point, it’s like Mother Nature is telling you to grow something else.

Butternut squash.  Those are a definite yes.  They seem to grow well, produce a reasonable yield of calories per square foot, and keep well once harvested.  And they’re tasty.  I can even keep the powdery mildew off them if I’m willing to put in the effort (Post #G20).  The traditional Waltham variety has beaten all others that I’ve tried.  And they all taste the same.  So I see no reason to plant anything but that.

Green beans.  Despite early failures, those are definitely on the list.  For some reason, my first two plantings got hit by common bean mosaic.  Only the last planting had a significant yield.  They are labor-intensive to pick, but when they grow, they produce a nice steady yield.

Peas.  Of course, peas.  No work, some yield.  Every year, I am tempted into growing “bush type” peas, figuring they need no support.  Every year, I regret that when I end up with a tangle of peas that is difficult to harvest and impossible to weed.  So my pledge is never to grow peas without support again.  No matter what.

Beets, rutabagas, turnips, radishes.  Maybe.  I’m taking radishes off the list.  Even if they grow to size, I just don’t like them enough to bother to grow them.  Beets have been a total failure due to failure-to-sprout.  But I now know this is a common problem in heavy soils, and I’ll try something new next year.  Rutabagas and turnips were a near-total-failure this year, for reasons unknown.  But the turnip varieties that grew were tasty — not at all like the turnips of my youth.  So these remain on the list, if only because, in theory, you can get an early spring crop of them.  I’m not going to bother with a fall crop because, unlike the spring crop, the fall-planted ones were devastated by insect or insects unknown.

Lettuce:  Yes.  I never had any luck at all in the past, but this year, the lettuce seemed to thrive with no intervention on my part.  Zero calories, but nice in salads.  I’ll go for both a spring and a fall crop again.

Peppers.  Well, I guess so.  I mean, they are edible, they produce a nice steady crop, and (this year, at least) they seem to grow with no intervention on my part.  They make a nice lacto-fermented pickle when there are more than can be eaten at once.  Now that I know that I can grow them, rather than pick up the first seed pack I see at the hardware store, I’ll do a little more research on sweet pepper varieties.

Others.  I’ll probably try okra again, but only if I can get my hands on some of the high-yield varieties.  Four mature Clemson Spineless never gave me enough pods at one time to do anything with.  Eggplant, I may try for a late-spring planting.  A planting for fall harvest yielded a lot of leaves and little in the way of anything edible.  I have a few herbs that may overwinter, and I have garlic started for harvest next year.  I may try walking onions next year.  Not that I’m particularly fond of them, but every other variety of onion I have tried has failed.  I’m still undecided on pumpkins, if only because they need a lot of space and a lot of time to mature.  If I plant them again, they are going in early, in the back corners of the yard.  And then if they survive, great, and if they don’t, so be it.

That’s it for this garden year.  I don’t anticipate posting anything about gardening until next year.  If then.

Post #G21-057: First frost, fall garden fail, COVID winter prep

 

Depending on exactly which forecast you believe, we should have our first frost in Vienna VA sometime in the next few days, possibly as early as tonight.  The National Weather Service is showing lows of 33F for the next few nights at Dulles Airport.  Other forecasts show lows of 31F.

A first frost date in the next few days puts us more-or-less exactly on the recent upward trend line.  This is the National Weather Service data for Dulles, VA. for the past few decades.

Not unexpected.

At this point, I can evaluate my “fall garden” as more-or-less a complete failure.  In theory, you can plant crops late in the summer, for fall harvest.  In practice, as far as I can tell, plants grow so slowly in the reduced temperatures and sunlight of the fall (Post #055) that the harvest is hardly worth the effort.

Plants that were already well-established continued to produce at reduced levels.  E.g., I got a few more peppers off the pepper plants.  But the plants that I put in at the end of August have produced more-or-less nothing.  A few eggplant, a few lettuce leaves.  Not worth the bother.

In hindsight, I note that a lot of the sites that I referenced said that you can plant certain crops late in the year.  And that was true.  I planted them, and, in theory, I got them in before the days-to-maturity exceeded the likely first frost date.  I did, in fact, successfully grow them.

I think I’ve learned the difference between “can” and “should” in this case.  I can direct-sow crops in late summer for a fall harvest.  But I’m not convinced that I should.  This year, that seems to have been a near-total waste of time. Either I have to start my fall garden in the heat of late July, or start the plants indoors for planting outside in late August.  Or just skip it.

Finally, with first frost, we are now starting the season of low indoor relative humidity.  As I have noted in many prior posts, I think that low relative humidity increases the spread of respiratory illness.   I believe that national heating and cooling experts say the same:

As of today, there’s scant indication that there will be any resurgence of COVID-19 this winter.  That said, I’m sticking to the plan.  I have a couple of hygrometers placed around my home.  (Why not?  They’re cheap.)  When indoor relative humidity dips below 40 percent, I’m going to drag my humidifiers out of the closet and get them running.  As with wearing a mask, or getting vaccinated, it’s just another harmless bit of cheap insurance against airborne illness.

Post #G21-056: First frost date trend and an outdated farmers’ market law in Vienna VA

 

Over the past two-and-a-half decades, our fall first-frost date has been getting later.

That’s not really a surprise.  Global warming and all that.  Temperatures are rising slightly in most of North America.  Among other things, the USDA hardiness zones have been shifting consistently northward.

The surprise here is the rate at which our first-frost date is changing.  In Fairfax County, it’s been getting later at the rate of about one day per year.  That may not not sound like much, but it means that our typical first-frost date is more than three weeks later than it was back in the 1990s.

I found that to be a surprisingly rapid change, so I thought I’d post it.

And then, maybe if I’m still feeling the math, I’ll work up the likelihood that this year will have the latest first-frost data on record for Fairfax County, VA.  But muse of math seems to have abandoned me, so that will have to be a separate Part II of this post. Continue reading Post #G21-056: First frost date trend and an outdated farmers’ market law in Vienna VA

Post #G21-055: The slow fall garden

 

Source:  Weather Underground, 10-day forecast for Vienna, VA accessed 10/19/2021.

This is the first year that I specifically planted vegetables in late summer, for fall harvest.

I didn’t adequately anticipate how slowly vegetables grow as we move into fall, here in Zone 7.  I’m still growing vegetables, but I’m certainly not growing a lot of vegetables.

Given that growth appears to have slowed to a crawl in my garden, I’d like to have some guess as to just how slow a crawl that is. Continue reading Post #G21-055: The slow fall garden

Post #G21-054: My first frost date will be late this year.

 

As fall progresses, it’s time to start looking out for the first frost.  For open-air gardeners, that’s when you either start hassling with some sort of overnight frost protection, or you call it quits for the year on any frost-sensitive plants.

I still have a lot of things growing in my garden that I would like to harvest before first frost.  These are plants that survived the summer (peppers, sweet potatoes) and vegetables planted specifically for fall harvest (lettuce, spinach, peas, green beans, eggplant).

For Vienna, VA, in Zone 7, first frost is expected on or about October 24 (Post #G21-052).  That’s the “30th percentile” first frost date.  Over the past three decades, first frost has occurred on or after that date 70 percent of the time.

As I noted in earlier posts, the “last spring frost” and “first fall frost” concepts are crude.  They are unconditional probabilities, that is, they simply summarize what occurred in the past.  They don’t account for the current weather this year, and they don’t account for the presence of long-term (e.g., ten-day) forecasts.

For the spring last frost date, the presence of good long-term (e.g., ten-day)  forecasts shifts the odds in your favor (Post #G21-005).  That happens because you won’t plant if frost is in the forecast.  That obvious observation converts the unconditional “30th percentile” spring date into a conditional “10th percentile” date.  Just by keeping an eye on the 10-day forecast in the spring, you can cut your odds of a post-planting frost from 30% to 10%.

The same should be true of the fall first-frost date, but without any significant real-world consequences.  As with the spring date, the current ten-day forecast should help you predict the first-frost date more accurately than the simple unconditional 30th percentile date.  But unlike spring, the plants are already in the ground.  This might give you a bit longer time to plan when to harvest the last of your garden, but that’s about it.

The statement above ignores the potential for significant predictive help from “seasonal forecasts”, which I take to mean forecasts of average weather conditions made months in advance.  There are a lot of issues there, the foremost of which being that these tend to be vague (e.g., the prediction will be whether or not a season will warmer or colder, wetter or dryer, than usual).

To put it plainly, even if the forecast is for a warmer-than-normal fall, nobody has done the analysis to translate that into a specific prediction for the fall first frost date.  It’s not even clear if it is feasible to do that.  And so, this year, the prediction is for a warm fall in this area (e.g., this reporting, or this reporting).  But I have no clue what that implies for first frost date.

You can access the official U.S. seasonal climate forecasts on-line.  As is the custom for the modern age, you can go play with them in an interactive map, courtesy of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, below:

Source:  NOAA.gov

NOAA says there’s a good chance that temperatures will be warmer than normal in my area.  I’m sure that’s helpful to somebody, but surely not to me.  I’m guessing that’s about as good as they can do, and, given the inherently (mathematically) chaotic nature of weather, that may be about as well as they will ever be able to do.

As a result, I’m not holding out much hope for a super-accurate seasonal forecast.  Instead, I’m sticking with the idea that the only actionable information is the current ten-day forecast.

Source:  The Weather Channel, accessed 10/11/2021.

Based on today’s ten-day forecast for my area, I have little to worry about regarding the 10/24 first frost date.

I’d like to ask a couple of questions, given this forecast, but I don’t have the data, and I don’t think I can get my hands on the data.  First, I’d like to know the odds that it actually will freeze on October 24th, given that the forecast low is in the high 40’s.  I would also like to estimate what the actual first frost date is likely to be, given this forecast.  Both of those would require having historical data on the 10-day forecasts.  And, while I’m sure that somebody has stored that information, there’s no way for me to get my hands on it.

In any case, this has almost zero practical importance.  The only change this makes in my gardening is for two remaining pumpkin plants that I was about to pull out.  These were late to set fruit, to the point where neither of them was going to be able to produce an edible pumpkin by October 24.  I was about to clear that bed and set that up for over-wintering.

But now, given this forecast for warmth almost two weeks into the future, I think I’ll let them go.  You never know what another couple of weeks of growing season might bring.

Post #G21-053: The 2021 canning lid shortage was never resolved.

 

I’m getting ready to can some pickled vegetables, so I decided to take one last look at the 2021 canning lid shortage.

Upshot: It’s a problem that was never resolved.  Even now, in most parts of the country, you aren’t going to be able to go to your local store and buy Ball wide-mouth canning lids.

A little history

I first stumbled across the pandemic-driven shortage of home canning supplies last year (Post #G12, July 2020).  At that point, I had to look around a bit to find wide-mouth jars.  I noted the logical progression from that year’s shortage of garden seeds, to last year’s shortage of common garden chemicals, to, inevitably, last year’s shortage of canning supplies.  By August 2020 stories about the canning supply shortage had gone mainstream (Post #G21, August 2020).

In 2020, a shortage didn’t really stand out.  The first pandemic year was rife with shortages of consumer goods.  (Fill in toilet paper joke here.)  A shortage of canning supplies was nothing unusual.  It was just one of many.

And it’s not as if a shortage of canning supplies had never happened before in the U.S.  During the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, and the resulting U.S. energy crises, Americans faced a shortage of canning lids (documented in Post #G21-003, March 2021).

The roots of that shortage were attributed to the same source as the modern shortage.  Insecure people instinctively turn to growing their own food, and as a result, there’s an increased demand for home canning supplies that can’t be met by the existing supply chain.

But I was more than a bit surprised to hear that there was still a shortage of canning lids in spring of 2021 (Post #G21-003, March 2021).  Seriously, that was then, this is now.  This is America.  We don’t do shortages.  I more-or-less laughed it off, figuring that once manufacturers started shipping product for the 2021 canning season, the shortage would disappear.  That, after pointing out how irrational the price of lids had become.  Vendors were asking more for twelve lids than for twelve jars — the joke being that jars come with lids.

My assumption that the early 2021 canning lid shortage would go away was dead wrong.  Except for a brief period this spring when the new shipments arrived for the 2021 canning season, canning lids have been in-and-out-of-stock ever since. 

It’s an odd sort of shortage, in that you can go on-line and order lids at any time.  So it’s not as if lids are unavailable.  It’s more that name-brand lids cost three times the pre-pandemic price.  So you either pay far more for lids, you make do with imported lids of dubious quality, or you switch to re-usable lids (Post #G21-010) of a sort that are not familiar to most canners.

Or, at a last resort, re-use your canning lids.  While I never had to do that, but I did check out the method of boiling used lids for 20 minutes.  That’s supposed to remove the groove in the silicone from the prior use, making them more nearly fit for re-use.  And my observation is that boiling them does, in fact, relax the old groove in the silicone sealing material, as shown in the contrast of an un-boiled and boiled used lid, below.

One final oddity of the U.S. situation is that we’re dealing with a monopoly supplier, more-or-less.  All of the familiar top-drawer brands of U.S. lids (Ball, Kerr, Golden Harvest) are made by one subsidiary of a corporate conglomerate (documented in Post #G21-009).  The history of the one U.S. lid manufacturer — bought and sold and re-sold — is like a short course in what has gone wrong with U.S. industry.

In the end, my summary is that Ball canning isn’t even rounding error on the bottom line of its current owner, Newell Brands.  They’re the only supplier of trusted domestic single-use canning lids.  And as a result, they may not have to care very much if they meet home canners’ needs or not.

Lid availability at start and end of 2021 U.S. canning season

As of today (10/9/2021), my local Warmart has wide-mouth Ball lids back in stock, at the normal price of about $0.30 per lid.  And while that’s great for me, and while I check my local stores periodically, that doesn’t really indicate what the lid situation looks like nationally.

In the spring, I took 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes, and used the Walmart website to check local availability of wide-mouth Ball lids (Post #G21-025).  The results are shown below, with only 15% of stores having those lids in stock at that time.

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Source:  Analysis of search on the Walmart website, 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes.

Mid-summer, I tried to repeat that.  But by mid-summer, Walmart had simply pulled the listing for Ball wide-mouth jars off their website entirely.  I couldn’t repeat the analysis because I could no longer search for that product on their website.

But now that item is back on the Walmart website.  And, while the format of the results has changed a bit, the bottom line remains just about the same.  At the end of the 2021 canning season, the vast majority of Walmarts have no Ball wide-mouth lids on the shelf.

Source:  Analysis of search on the Walmart website, 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes.

One further interesting change is that Walmart won’t ship you three packages of lids, at a reasonable price, as they were sometimes willing to do back in the spring.  If the lids weren’t in stock, in every case, Walmart offered you a single internet vendor who would sell you wide-mouth lids for more than $1 each.

The bottom line is that the 2021 canning lid shortage was never resolved.  Near as I can tell, the situation at the end of the canning season is just about the same as it was this past spring.  In large parts of the country, you probably can’t go into your local stores and buy wide-mouth canning lids.

This has dropped out of national news entirely.  You’ll still see a tiny bit of reporting in areas where home canning is common, as in this August 2021 piece from Minnesota, or this farm-oriented article in June 2021.

I don’t know if there’s a larger lesson in this or not.  I had a reader email me about the monopoly-supplier aspect of this shortage (to which I am now sorry that I never replied).  The idea being that the concentration of market share into fewer and fewer hands, throughout the U.S. and global economies, is giving results that are not in consumers’ best interests.  While I’d certainly believe that monopolies are bad for consumers, I have no way to know whether the persistence of the shortage of this plain-vanilla, low-tech product is in any way related to the near-monopoly position of the Newell Brands conglomerate.

Canada, for example, seems to face the same monopoly supplier situation as the U.S., with the two major brands there (Bernardin, Golden Harvest) owned by Newell Brands (via its Jarden subsidiary).  And yet, despite monopoly supply there as well, there does not seem to have been a Canadian canning lid shortage.

So it remains a puzzle.  Going on two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s still hard to get hold of name-brand canning lids in the U.S.  Of all the shortages you might have expected, that has to be pretty close to the bottom of the list.  And yet, of all the shortages we faced, this seems to be among the most persistent.

If you want to see my list of what you can do if you can’t get Ball/Kerr/Golden Harvest lids, try the end of Post #G21-020.

 

Post #G21-052: Starting to wrap up the garden year.

 

Last year, I put in some raised beds and made a serious effort to grow some vegetables.  Mostly, it was to have something to do during the pandemic.  If nothing else, during all that isolation, it was cheering to look out my back window and see a patch of giant sunflowers.

Now it’s year two of the pandemic and of my garden.  I’m done with planting for the year, and I’m focused on winding things down, and on the likely first frost date for Vienna, VA.

It seems like a good time to summarize what did and did not go well this year.  Mostly as a reminder to myself, but also in case anyone else might benefit from reading it.

After a brief note on first frost dates, I’ll go through methods and techniques I tried this year, and maybe finish up with some notes on individual vegetables, if there is anything notable to say.  Click the links to go to the relevant sections.  Click the links below to see those sections, click the “back” link to return here.
 Continue reading Post #G21-052: Starting to wrap up the garden year.

Post #G21-051: Adding to my deer deterrent arsenal.

I have an un-fenced vegetable garden in Vienna, VA.  Which means that I have a problem with deer.

We all know that deer can read.  Otherwise, how would then know where to cross the highway?  But for some reason, they scoff at my no-deer-allowed signs.

This post is a summary of everything I think I know about deterring deer from eating my garden.  And an introduction to my latest deer-deterrent device, wireless deer fence.

Edit on 3/9/2024:  A year after I wrote this, I ended up buying an electric fence.  Those are a) surprisingly cheap, b) surprisingly easy to set up and take down, and c) effective against deer.  So far.  I use an electric fence to define the outer perimeter of my garden, and run a couple of motion-activated sprinklers (“Yard Defender” and similar) inside the perimeter.  That combination has turned out to be effective.  So far.    See (e.g.) Post G22-063, to see what one looks like.  If you don’t have little kids or pets to worry about, I’d say that a small, portable electric fence setup should be the backbone of your deer deterrence.  So much so that I planned my new garden layout with an electric fence in mind.  Take it down in the fall, put it back up when you have something worth defending, in the spring.

Why it’s so hard to separate fact from fiction regarding deer repellents

Much has been written on deer deterrents, some of which might even be true.  But it has taken some sifting and sorting to try to separate what I believe to be true, from what I believe to be false.

The first problem with evaluating deer deterrents it that deer damage is sporadic.  The deer will come by, mow down a row of (say) beans, and move on.  They might be back tomorrow, they might be back next month.  You might have one herd of deer frequenting your garden.  You might have several distinct herds.  I’ve had long stretches where I’ve seen no evidence of deer.  I have had stretches where I’ve seen them daily.

As a result, absent a serious large-scale controlled trial, all tests of deer deterrents are one-way tests.  If you see continued deer damage, you know they are not working.  But if you see no damage, well, you just don’t know whether the deer deterrent worked, or whether you just got lucky for a spell.  There is a real element of people mistaking luck for effectiveness.

The second problem with evaluating deer deterrents is that deer differ, conditions differ, and the attractiveness of your plantings (compared to other nearby forage) will differ.  People swear that deer love hostas.  We have hostas all over our yard, and the deer have never touched them.  Others will swear that deer won’t eat tomato plants.  Yet that doesn’t stop my deer from chowing down on mine from time to time, at least when the plants are young.

This generates a true “path of least resistance” effect.  Deer manage their risk/return tradeoff depending on what’s available.  Deterrents that might work on some plants, in some circumstances, will not work in others.  If you’re growing something that deer find merely edible, but there is better forage nearby, maybe a simple folklore-style deterrent (Irish Spring soap) will convince them to go elsewhere.  But if you’re growing something that deer really like (e.g., sunflowers), and there’s little for them to browse elsewhere, you’re going to have to seek a stronger solution if you’re going to keep the deer off those plants.

As a result, the available information is a mix of:

  • Proper controlled tests run by (e.g.) state extension services.  These focus almost exclusively on commercially-available products that would be of use to (say) farms, orchards, and the like, to the exclusion of things you might use in your back yard.
  • Claims/testimonials from manufacturers.  Who, of course, are not going to tout any of the negative reviews.
  • Self-reports from people who have tried some deer deterrent.  This is everything from thoughtful advice from individuals who lots of experience, to anecdotes from people who tried something and the deer went away, to classic friend-of-a-friend urban-legend style stories where the person doing the writing isn’t the person with the actual deer problem.

And in each case, the solutions that some people will swear by may or may not work in your circumstances.  Just as the plants that some will swear are “deer proof” may or may not be, depending on just how hungry the deer are.  And the same for plants that are thought to attract deer.

The facts, as I believe them to be.

I’m not giving citation as to source here.  This is just a summary of my impression of what’s true about deterring deer, based on extensive reading of internet sources.

  • Deer do prefer certain plants, and not others.  You can find lists all over the internet.  But if they are motivated enough, they’ll eat almost anything.
  • The only 100%-sure fixed deer deterrent is a physical barrier such as a tall fence, a properly configured electric fence, caging or netting.
  • A properly-trained dog, allowed to roam, is also said to be 100% effective in keeping deer out of your yard.
  • Deer get more aggressive as fall approaches.  Deterrents that worked earlier in the year may not work then, or you have to ramp them up (e.g., increase the concentrations of odor-based deterrents).
  • Deer will get used to any fixed device meant to scare them.  They actively test the limits of your deer deterrents and stay just beyond those limits, or figure ways to work around them.

If I had it to do all over again.

I use several different deer deterrents.  Mostly, I only started gardening seriously last year, and I wasn’t sure what would work or not.  So, I tried a range of them, to hedge my bets.

If I had to start from scratch, knowing what I now know, I believe I’d invest a few hundred dollars in several Yard Enforcer motion-activated sprinklers, and the associated hoses.  I’d set up double coverage of every bit of garden beds that I have.  And I’d leave them on the “night” setting, so that I’d never forget to turn them back on after I’ve been working in the garden.

This would be a somewhat expensive solution.  The hoses would eventually sun-rot from being left out continuously, and would need to be replaced.  You’d probably cut one with the mower now and then.  And I’d guess that I would not expect to get more than five years’ reliable service from the motion-activated sprinkler.

That said, absent leaks, or freezing weather, I think this would solve my problem with minimal effort on my part.  As far as I can tell, the deer have never gotten used to the Yard Enforcer that I have.  I’m not sure if that’s luck, or whether it really does annoy them enough to keep them away in the long run.  But so far, when I remember to turn it on, for the area that it covers, it seems to keep the deer at bay.  This clearly would not work if you need to protect plants when temperatures drop below freezing.

What I have actually used, so far.

Bobbex deer repellent.  This has an excellent reputation, and really does seem to work in my situation.  I couldn’t really say if it’s any better or worse than any other name-brand odor-based repellent.

It has some drawbacks.  It stinks, so it’s kind of nasty to mix up and apply (you use a spray bottle).  You have to re-apply it at two-week or one-week intervals.  You can’t spray it directly on fruits or vegetables (it taints the taste of them).  And you have to amp it up as fall approaches, according to the directions, because the deer get more aggressive.

Of all that, the biggest drawback for me is that you have to remember to mix it up and use it every week, during peak deer season.  I’m just not that regular in my gardening habits.  (And, clearly, it’s not going to work if you take an extended vacation).

Yard Enforcer motion-activated sprinkler.  The deer don’t seem to get used to this one.  As long as I remember to turn it on, it seems to provide complete protection to the area it covers.

The hose connection on mine leaked, but a ten-cent rubber hose washer fixed the problem.  You do have to change the batteries every once in a while.  And I get a lot of false triggers in bright sunlight.

I have taken to leaving it set on “night”.  On that setting, it’s only active in the dark.  That way, I don’t have to turn it on and off as I go into and out of the garden.  (Or, more likely, turn it off and forget that I’ve done that).  And that avoids the false triggers in bright sunlight.

Home-made motion-activated radio (Post #G07).  I left this one in the shed this year.  It works, but it requires having an extension cord running across the lawn.  Not only will that eventually sun-rot, but there’s no convenient way to turn it off.  As a consequence, I was always triggering this as I went out into the garden.  (Don’t know if it scares the deer, but it never failed to scare the pee out of me.)  I think this would work well in an area that you didn’t routinely walk through.  But in an area where you do some sort of activity almost daily, this was less than ideal.

Blood meal, Irish spring soap, and other similar folklore-based repellents.  These had no appreciable effect that I could see.  Doesn’t mean that they don’t work in some circumstances.  Just didn’t seem to keep the deer away in mine.

New for this fall:  Wireless Deer Fence.

As fall sets in, the deer get larger, hungrier, and more aggressive.  It gets increasingly hard to keep them out of the garden.  And, frankly, I get tired of spraying stinking solutions every week, trying to keep them out.  And I’ll forget to turn on the Yard Enforcer after I’ve been working in the garden.

I looked over what was commercially available, and settled on “wireless deer fence“, three units for $60.  That’s probably not quite enough for the size of my garden, but these will work in conjunction with everything else.

The wireless deer fence consists of roughly one-foot-tall plastic stakes that hold a deer-attracting scent-based lure.  They hold that lure in the middle of four high-voltage metal tines, running off a couple of AA batteries in the base.  If the deer touches nose or tongue to the tines, it gets a nasty shock.  And, ideally, this trains the deer to go elsewhere.  Place one wherever you note deer damage.

Of course I tried it on myself.  (If this turned out to be really horrific, I wasn’t going to use it.)  I did not have the moxie to lick it, deer-style.  Instead, I tapped it on my wet skin.  It hurts, but not too badly.  Felt about the same as brushing up against an electric fence.  Unpleasant and startling, but not hugely painful.  And no lingering pain once you lose contact with the high-voltage metal.  Once you break contact, you’re fine.

Based on the company’s write-up, one shock is enough to train any one deer to stay away.  In the grand scheme of things — no damage, no lasting pain, one shock, and trying it out on myself first — this did not seem like an excessively cruel deer deterrent to me.  Others could reasonably disagree.

And so, you place these where you see deer damage.  Maybe move them from time to time, just so the deer don’t know how to avoid them.

So far, they seem to work.  But, as noted above, there’s really no way for the backyard user to separate cause-and-effect from sheer luck, when it comes to deer deterrents.

Conclusion.

Now you know everything about this topic that I think I know.  A tall fence was not practical for my garden.  I’m fairly sure that an electric fence would be illegal in my area.  I don’t own a dog.  So I’m left with a mix of second-best solutions.

Edit, 3/9/2024:  Turns out, only barbed wire fencing is explicitly illegal in my area (Fairfax County VA).  County code does not address electric fences.  Not sure whether that’s on purpose, or because they never thought any back-yard gardener would be crazy enough to install an electric fence.  In any case, there is no legal ban on electric fences where I live.

This year, I planted my most deer-attractive plants right next to the Yard Enforcer.  I put things that deer don’t like — potatoes, for example — on the edges of the garden.  That, by itself, worked fairly well.

I’ve kept up with the Bobbex from time to time.  And I’ve now installed three wireless deer fence devices.

I still get some deer damage.  Mostly when I forget.  Forget to spray, forget to turn the Yard Enforcer back on.  But I’ve managed to keep it to a tolerable level.  As long as the deer are here and hungry, that’s about the best I can hope for.