Liquid fence deer and rabbit repellent reviews

Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2011

Effective, but one needs to apply it at least weekly, if you have deer in your area. It smells like hog manure and your outdoors area will stink for a day or so. Be careful to wear rubber gloves and not get the spray on you, because you will stink like hog manure, too.

If it rains, much of this repellent will wash off and the deer will soon be eating your plants again. Also, you must promptly spray any new, green growth that sprouts. The deer will eat the new, unsprayed blooms, shoots or leaves at the top or edges of a plant, even though you have sprayed the rest of the plant thoroughly. The deer apparently can distinguish the uncontaminated blooms, shoots or leaves from the rest of the plant, despite the plant's general, overall bad smell.

You will need to maintain your sprayer, too, a messy job. After mixing, the stuff soon settles to the bottom of the sprayer in an inch or so of sludge. When the sprayer siphon tube sucks this up, it will clog the nozzle or other part of the spray mechanism. It is a foul task to clear some of these clogs. In use, one shakes up the sprayer vigorously in order to mix the sludge back into the water. And if you do not use your sprayer for a while, you may find it helpful to mix it up a couple of times a week to prevent the sludge from becoming too dense and solid. To do these mixing actions, ensure that the hose, pump handle, etc. are secure, and pick up the sprayer to shake it.

I bet your plant nursery staff will tell you "funny, deer don't usually eat that _____ plant." I have found otherwise. Deer will eat tender new growth on almost anything. Spraying with Liquid Fence is expensive and a foul job, but it helps.

Additional advice. After mixing, pick up the sprayer and shake vigorously. Do this again if you have any delay between sprayings, even ten min.. The concentrate settles out into a sludge at the bottom of your sprayer. The sprayer will then suck up the sludge from the bottom, clog, and you will have to take out the spray head and siphon tube and run hot water through them, a real annoyance.

Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2014

Where I live in the mountains of AZ, the number of nibbling animals is huge: squirrels, desert rats, pocket gophers, rabbits, and javelina - to name a few. But it's in mid-May through late June when newly arrived deer moving up into the mountains for the summer can deadhead 200 roses overnight and nibble any new foliage on roses, heuchera, fruit trees, and a host of other plants. When that happens, I swear that next year I'll be ahead of the curve, and I'll start spraying early in May. I've been successful maybe three seasons out of six.

I use Liquid Fence because it seems to be somewhat more effective than other similar products, but it seems to me to be far from perfect. One big problem I have with Liquid Fence can best be explained by an old joke:

One of his neighbors asks a crusty old farmer why he never fixes his roof. The crusty farmer replies, "When it's rainin' there ain't no way I'm climbing up on that slippery roof; when the weather's dry, the roof don't need fixin'."

If you have a large garden, Liquid Fence can seem far too expensive to spray every week unless you know you would otherwise have a problem. You don't want to spray hundreds of dollars of stuff that makes your garden smell bad if there is no need to do so. But once you know you have a problem, chances are all the tender new leaves that the spray might have protected have already been eaten and the plant is nothing but bare twigs. Then there's nothing for the spray to stick to; foliage that emerges later is unprotected and will get nibbled away. If it's a young transplant, the plant is doomed.

In my own experience, if I am very aggressive in spraying the garden in mid-spring through early summer, and regular in spraying the garden throughout the rest of the season, then I find that Liquid Fence can play an important and useful role in defeating nibbling animals. When I get behind the curve a bit, all my new plants tend to be defoliated to the point of near-extinction. And then treating them with Liquid Fence does little good.