OH DEAR,NOT HORSE MANURE!

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Nature's deer repellent, rhubarb in a basket and the perfect milk paint.

COUNTRY LORE

by Joyce Tomanek

Here in the Southeast, we've never seen so many deer. Reports on television and in newspapers from many parts of the country report a widespread problem with deer invading even city yards and eating expensive plantings. I've found a simple, chemical free and inexpensive way to keep them from devouring my gardens and shrubbery.

Through the years, I've observed the feeding habits of cows and horses in our pastures and learned some basics. Cows will not graze where other cows have deposited their droppings. Horses, on the other hand, will eat where there is cow dung, but they won't eat grass in an area contaminated by horse manure. Interestingly, deer join horses in the pastures and seem to have the same eating habits, but I can never get close enough to them to see where they feed and where they don't.

So it happened that six years ago, when a new crop of asparagus emerged in my garden, the deer devoured it as quickly as it came up. I didn't know what to do. I put up an electric fence and it helped some, but the wiser critters soon jumped it and helped themselves. So one day, I sprinkled horse manure on part of the asparagus bed and left the other part of the bed alone. The next morning there was plenty of asparagus still sprouting from the manure covered area, but every shoot was eaten where there was no manure. Was it a coincidence, or did the deer just prefer the asparagus without manure? To find out, I covered the rest of the asparagus bed with horse manure and had no further problem with deer eating it that entire spring. Apparently deer, like horses, will not feed where there's horse manure. Since this discovery, I've routinely applied horse manure to my asparagus each spring and there hasn't been a deer problem yet.