For many years I had a large (one-acre) garden behind my parents’ house on the family farm. This gave me ready access to my brother’s huge tilling machinery and almost unlimited cow manure for fertilizer. Very early on, in the 1970s, I was devoted to organic growing practices. Fertilizer was no problem, but insect control was an issue. I used a combination of companion planting (planting things that repel bugs along with those they were attracted to, like dill with tomatoes and marigolds with green beans) and manual labor, where I paid the little kids a penny per potato bug until they demanded a wage increase. With all of the people coming and going and dogs running around, there were no wildlife marauders.
Raccoons destroyed the author’s patch of hybrid super-sweet corn. Joni Roberts copyright photo.
That changed when I moved the garden to the edge of a field about a quarter mile north of the house across the “crick,” as we called it. The south side of the new garden bordered the brushy creek, the east side was bound by an overgrown fence row and all around were large fields that alternated between alfalfa, beans, corn and soybeans. Beyond that was an extensive, unmanaged woodlot. So there was plenty of wildlife habitat near my garden.
That garden was my joy; when you love doing something, it isn’t work anymore. I experimented with varieties: I obtained seed from France, Italy and Spain; from Peru and Mexico; and dozens of ancient varieties of corn and beans grown by Native Americans in the Southwest for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. In addition to all kinds of heirloom tomatoes and even blue potatoes, I also grew the latest super sweet corn hybrids.
Just as soon as my new garden was flourishing, the local wildlife discovered just how tasty those old-fashioned vegetables can be, since many were bred for flavor rather than the ability to withstand long-distance shipping. (I once saw an Ohio harvest where tomatoes rolled up an elevator and dropped—dropped!—several feet into a dump truck. Ever wonder why many store-bought tomatoes are so hard?)
The first assault was by deer, which seemingly impossibly found my short row of heirloom Italian red beets within those hundreds of acres of crops and woodlands. They must have thoroughly explored my garden. This early beet variety has alternating purple and white stripes inside and is sweeter than the typical commercial beet. The deer chewed the tops down to the ground, surprisingly didn’t do any digging but left plenty of tracks, which meant that at that time the beets themselves were salvageable. The deer didn’t touch any of my other crops.
According to the DNR, there are around 2,000,000 deer in Michigan at present, some as densely concentrated as 80 per square mile. That’s quite a few deer, and probably no surprise to anyone who’s driven on Michigan highways, which are littered with deer carcasses.
What could I do to keep these creatures out of my garden? After all, I’d invested money (specialty seeds are hard to obtain and seeds in general can be expensive), and plenty of sweat. I wasn’t about to have it all come to nothing (or so I said) because of marauding wildlife.
It turns out that there are as many methods of repelling wildlife from the garden as there are people to ask, and in the end, plenty of pessimists say nothing short of an unclimbable enclosure will work.
I have a friend who lives just south of Big Bay in the U.P., surrounded by forest, and everything from the usual suspects to even moose and bear wander through her yard, yet nothing ever seems to bother her garden. Her secret (she claims): she puts a short chicken-wire fence around her plants on which she festoons blobs of her Norwegian elkhound’s fur.
It’s said that an intermittent floodlight may scare away raccoons, who prefer to work in the dark, and that a radio may keep away most animals, at least for the week or so it takes for them to become accustomed to it.
My old organic gardening books recommend using dried blood or blood meal, as herbivores like deer and rabbits dislike the smell. It can actually attract carnivores and omnivores like raccoons. A slaughterhouse byproduct, dried blood is also a potent and useful nitrogen source, and if improperly applied, can burn plants. So I sprinkled it along the remnants of my red beet row, hoping it would keep the deer away, and produce new growth and ultimately a crop for pickling.
Another method of driving away mammalian garden invaders that many people swear by is the application of predator urine along plant rows. Fox, bobcat, wolf and coyote urine, in both liquid and powdered forms, is available for trapping and animal repelling purposes. I thought this might be worth exploring. I found a bottle of coyote urine, along with little cotton balls on sticks to place around the garden, in a store in the middle of downtown Ann Arbor, of all places! I bought several ounces of coyote pee, which is not guaranteed to do anything, according to the person who sold it to me. “But it might be worth a try,” he said. Well, why not?
It was kind of pricey, but I later found a different brand of coyote urine in the same quantity at Jay’s in Clare for half the price. Both products were guaranteed “pure” and “carefully collected.” And no, I don’t know or want to know what they mean by that.
So I dutifully sprinkled liberal amounts of coyote urine along my rows of super-sweet hybrid sweet corn, a crop I was eager to protect. As the season progressed, raccoons demolished the whole corn patch, breaking down all the stalks and devouring the ears. Apparently they didn’t equate coyote urine with the live animals.
As a last resort, I started peeing all over my garden (not directly on the food), and actually the deer never came back. Though the idea is unappealing to us, human urine is sterile and is an excellent, free, and nutrient-rich fertilizer, containing high concentrations of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—the exact nutrients found in commercial fertilizers. Again, like blood meal, it should not directly touch the plant.
