I was hauling a load of garbage to the dump this morning; a pickup truck was coming my way, returning from the same errand.  Shortly before we met, a mule deer went bounding across the road between us. Yes, we live in the country where the deer and the antelope roam. Way too many of them, the deer anyway. We consider the deer to be cloven hooved rodents.

Sometimes the deer roam through our yard. I know some readers will be shocked to hear this, but we don’t like them roaming through our yard. They eat our trees. Around here, deer are regarded with approximtely the same amount of affection as mice.

All you Bambi lovers can relax, I don’t own a gun and we don’t use violent methods to keep deer out of our yard. We don’t use commercial deer repellants, either. A tree farmer in British Columbia did an experiment a few years ago, using every brand of commercial deer repellant he could get his hands on, plus deer netting, and Dial soap. None of the commercial products made one bit of difference, the deer contentedly snacked away on his young trees. However, they did avoid the trees where he had hung bars of Dial soap. He thought any strongly scented soap would have the same effect.

Inspired by that report, I started hanging mesh bags of Irish Spring soap next to our young trees. That was over three years ago and there has been no evidence of the deer nibbling on the trees protected by Irish Spring soap.  Those trees have grown very quickly since they stopped being lunch for deer.

I think it would be best to buy the original (stronger-scented) Irish Spring soap for this purpose.