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Keep Deers Out Of Your Garden With This Laundry Staple
By ROCHELLE HEATH-HARRIS
Deer are lovely animals,
but they like anything edible you can grow in your garden, as well as grass and flowers. Thankfully, you can keep them from your garden with a bar of soap.
A 1991 University of Nebraska study confirmed that soap with high levels of tallow is very effective at repelling deer. Irish Spring original scent is particularly potent.
The first way to use soap is to cut the bar into cubes and hang them above your plants. You can also put the cubes in the ground around new plants as you grow seedlings.
Another method is to grate the soap with a cheese grater when you first plant seeds. Start with grating up a bar of soap, and sprinkle it all around the seeds you plant.
Spread the soap pieces around the soil of the land before the plants peek their heads from beneath it. Another tactic you can use is to put the bars of soap in mesh bags.
Mesh bags have holes, so you can put a bar in a bag and hang it at deer-head level around the plants you want to protect. One soap bar will cover an area of around 10 by 10 feet.
The final method you can use is to cut your soap into ½ inch pieces, and fill a cheesecloth bag up to about two or three inches high with the soap.
Hang the bags from a tree or a shepherd's hook where you want to repel deer. If you use multiple bags, place them at least within three feet of each other to maximize efficacy.