Carpetblog Goes Electric
I have problems with live deer too
Previous posts might have given the impression that my main roe deer problem is I find them dead in places I’d rather they not be. This is true but I also have problems with deer that are alive in places I’d rather they not be.
I am very excited about my garden. It will have ample water, wormy soil and full sun. Once spring is more aggressive, I will be ready to sow so that I might reap later in the summer. I want the capacity to feed myself in case of global economic and political collapse.
This plan is not without risks. That I have neither grown a big garden before nor have I ever successfully fed myself are the most obvious ones. I mitigate the risks I can and leave the rest to fate.
Roe deer are a very big threat to my garden. I have to keep them out. But how?
“You can ask Sam,” my sister suggested. “But he’s going to say shoot the fucking deer.”
My brother-in-law Sam is a legitimate move-cows-around-cowboy. The most important thing to know about Sam is that his solution to almost all problems is to shoot them.
As predicted, Sam told me to shoot the fucking deer.
His solution was impractical for reasons I don’t need to explain.
Put "deer fence” in YouTube and a lot of colorful content emerges, mostly from the American south where “shoot the fucking deer” is the default solution. “If you can’t do that, here are some other, inferior approaches” is the subtext.
Experts say you cannot make a fence so high that deer cannot jump over it. But you don’t need to. Like Dylan at Newport, you can go electric.
This was good news. My youth was spent around electric fencing — being chased into it by aggressive “pets,” telling my sister that I’d unplugged it when I hadn’t, avoiding touching it while on horseback. Constructing an electric deer fence seemed within my skillset.
Like horses and me, deer have bad depth perception. The secret to deterring them is adding an element of uncertainty about what they will land on, like another electric fence, if they jump over it. According to the deer fence experts on Youtube, all you need is two parallel rows of electric wire set a couple feet apart at different heights to make deer distrust their judgement and find someone else’s garden. If this doesn’t work, you can add more wires. Experts suggest starting with the simplest deterrent, keeping some powder dry in case you need to escalate.
I settled on a charger, largely based on the power of this video. It’s only a couple seconds long but the goat footage is riveting. If you know goats you know exactly how it all went down.
So, has it kept the deer out? I haven’t built it yet. Winter lingers and the gas crisis still stings. I have to wait a couple more weeks before I can stay up there without freezing. But I have all the equipment and it’s all mapped out.
If the electric deer fence doesn’t work, there’s always plan B.
How did I know this post would feature us?