Deer
Deer
Facts about Deer
1. Deer eat a wide variety of plants, but their main food item is browse—the growing tips of trees and shrubs. In late winter and early spring, deer eat grass, clover, and other herbaceous plants (Table 2).
2. Deer also eat fruit, nuts, acorns, fungi, lichens, and farm and garden crops if available.
3. For their first few weeks of life, fawns thrive on milk, which is more than twice as rich in total solids as the best cow milk.
4. Deer eat rapidly and, being ruminants, initially chew their food only enough to swallow it. This food is stored in a stomach called the “rumen.” From there it is regurgitated, then re-chewed before being swallowed again, entering a second stomach where digestion begins. From there it is passed into a third and then a fourth stomach, finally entering the intestine.
The best offense is a good defense. This statement holds true for keeping deer out of your garden. Here is recipe for a homemade deer repellant that is tried and true. If used on a regular basis, it will prevent deer from eating favorite garden plants.
4 tablespoons ground cayenne pepper
1 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup peeled garlic
1 cup clear ammonia
1 cup Murphy’s oil soap
1 bar Ivory hand soap (optional)
Boil the cayenne in the vinegar for one minute, then strain it through a coffee filter. In a blender, purée the garlic in two cups of water, then strain that mixture through another filter.
Combine the two filtered liquids with the ammonia and oil soap in a 3-gallon garden sprayer. Fill the sprayer to the maximum level with water, and spray this concoction around all of the areas you want to protect. For extra stickiness, float a bar of Ivory soap in the sprayer and let it slowly dissolve over several fillings.
More:
Can this solution be sprayed directly on to the vegetable plants and the tomatoes as they are developing? OR will it injure the foilage and fruits? I only want to use it on the garden.
JIM
Jim
I think that tomatoes won’t suffer