North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Jenny Ruth Yasi" <voices@maine.rr.com>]

> > This year, I am trying motion detectors. Last year, I used a radio and it 
> > worked well until the radio failed and the deers were back after a few 
> > days. I am currently shopping for the perfect motion detector.
Fencing can be quite expensive when you have a large area. <<

We had a motion detector with lights. Then we even added a radio set to a 
talk show station. That meant we were woken several times a night to outside 
lights and talk radio. The deer weren't even slighly phased. Deer are 
actually very intelligent animals, with interesting personalities, and they 
love to see what they're eating, they love talk radio.  We actually saw a 
deer fight once, clacking horns and everything. They really loved our 
garden! They pulled trees right up by the roots, they destroyed so many 
plants! They'd pull chicken wire off beans and eat the whole patch the hour 
before we planned to harvest. I vaugely remember we rigged something to set 
off a sprinkler, I don't remember how. We had bars of soap on string. We 
yelled out the windows and tried to shoo them away. Once I had to call the 
cops because I had a doe leaning on my living room windows, cornered by a 
buck, and the buck couldn't be chased off and wouldn't let me leave the 
house. The cops came and ran their sirens and banged on pot lids and chased 
them off, but both the buck and the doe came right back.  We were literally 
tripping over deer, because they would climb up on our porch to eat the 
pumpkins and fall asleep there. We had one go into our basement after the 
chicken feed. So finally we fenced in about half an acre(now we've got 
almost an acre and a half fenced in) and then we were able to live like 
normal people. At first we used the black plastic deer fence, and that was 
very affordable, easy to deal with (stapled to trees), but last fall we went 
to the galvanized wire game fence, which was heavier to deal with but 
actually not a whole lot more expensive, and it should last 100 years. You 
can get 330 feet of triple galvanized high tensile strength steel fencing 
for less than $500.

Yasi