#deer fences

[barrierboss]

Top 5 Deer Fencing Options: Ensuring Your Plants Remain Safe and Secure

Gardening can be a truly rewarding hobby, but it comes with its fair share of challenges—one of the biggest being wildlife, particularly dee

Discover the top 5 deer fencing options to protect your garden from deer damage. Learn about the best materials and solutions to keep your plants safe and secure.

[deerfenceus]

Introduction:

Deer fencing is effective at keeping deer out of areas of all sizes, from small backyard gardens to entire farms and estates. The amount of deer pressure your property is under also determines the right DeerFence USA product for you

[fenceblog]

Electric Deer Fence Gear You Want To Know About

There's a lot of the gear for electric fences which is not required but can increase attractiveness, ease installation, or protect against weeds and lightning damage. If you ever plan on moving your fence you should have spools and winders. Reasons for moving the fence can be seasonal removal camping use or rotational grazing. But whatever the reason being able to wind up and spool out your conductor is a great advantage. Metal wire should never be strung or respooled. To easily turn off fence or a portion of your fence you should use a throw switch. This is especially useful when using an AC charger which may be far away or difficult to access. a double throw switch can be used to switch between grounding systems. This adds a level of sophistication and is useful for when the ground is frozen or dry. For more information on extra grounding systems please see our video on additional grounding.

If you are keeping out dear you may want to bait your fence with scent caps. These will prompt the deer to lick the fence and ensure that they get a serious shock. Polytape users may want clips to hold their loose ends. This can be done for esthetic reasons or to prevent the tape from contacting anything and grounding out. It is also courteous to warn people of the existence of the fence with warning signs even though most chargers are not strong enough to harm humans. If you live in an area with a lot of plant life and have a long fence you may want an energy limiter. This device delays the pulse of electricity from entering the bottom wire. Thus any drain created by plants contacting the bottom wire takes place after at the top wires have already had a chance to shock the target animal. Electric fences are quite vulnerable to lightning damage so you may want to take precautions if you live in a high risk area.

Lightning choke and diverter is a device which diverts lightning away from your charger. It requires its own ground rods which should be kept at least forty feet away from the primary ground rod and the charger. Splice you diverter into your active wire between the charger and the fence. When a huge pulse of electricity surges through the wire it will jump the gap in the diverter and travel to your larger secondary grounding system well away from your charger. All of these devices are not necessary to the basic functions of an electric fence. However they can be very useful for reducing maintenance increasing portability and protecting your expensive fence charger.

[fenceblog]

Deer Fence Installation Video Guide

Hiring professional deer fence installers can be costly. If you are considering doing the project yourself the video above will help you with the main components of your fence in the following order:

Set the posts (including corner posts, corner braces, end braces, and earth anchors).

Attach the monofilament line or tie wire that runs along the top of the fencing (needed for all but short polypropylene fences).

Attach a length of fencing to the monofilament line and supporting posts and trees, section by section, making adjustments for grade changes as needed. Be sure to leave enough fencing at the bottom to allow for a six-inch bottom flap.

Secure the fence bottom with ground stakes.

Install gates and attach warning flags.

[fenceblog]

How To Install Angle Iron Posts For Deer Fences

A less expensive alternative to round metal posts is black-painted steel angle-iron posts. These fence posts have a smaller cross-section than the round posts and are less likely to be heaved up by frost. However, angle-iron deer fence posts are not robust enough to serve as corner posts when the weight of a metal hexagrid fence, falling branches, snow, or deer are likely to create major stress. So in these cases, wood posts or round metal posts should be used on the corners.

More details: how to install angle-iron deer fence posts

[fenceblog]

How To Install Wooden Deer Fence Posts

Wood posts are thicker and stronger than T-posts or metal angle-iron posts. This often makes it worth it to use wooden deer fence posts at the corners. Fence installation companies will also use wooden posts where the fence is expected to bear major loads.

Try to avoid using untreated wood, as untreated wood in contact with the soil could rot quickly. These fence posts should be set 3' into the soil, and 4' at the stress points. Like other fence posts, wooden posts should be spaced 15' apart for metal hexagrid fencing, 20' apart for polypropylene. The deer fencing should be loosely attached to each post with five or so U-nails. As a rule-of-thumb, the deer fencing should be pulled tight enough so that it stands straight and rigid, but no tighter.

More detailed instructions: How to install wooden deer fencing posts & how to use trees for deer fences.

[fenceblog]

Will An Electric Fence Keep Deer Out?

That depends. If you have a one wire baited electric deer fence that is well-maintained, with the baited wire running about 3 feet off the ground, the fence stands a reasonable chance of keeping deer out until some member of the herd learns to jump it. At that point the game is up and the rest will follow. So it’s a good idea to keep one wire fences fairly short (660 feet or less) for the purpose of keeping deer contact to a minimum; and it’s also a good idea to use some more robust alternative if you’re dealing with more than a few deer.

One such alternative is a "three-dimensional" fence, so called because it uses two sets of posts three feet apart to give it depth. The outer posts hold a single charged and baited wire 3 feet off the ground, while the inner posts hold two wires at 2 and 4 feet. This arrangement gives the deer more to jump over, and since deer have terrible depth perception (their eyes being on the sides of their heads) it makes the fence into something they are reluctant to challenge. Of course, they may challenge it; or a tree branch may fall on it; or lightning may strike it; or weeds may grow up and touch the bottom wire. Any of these things can neutralize the fence, causing it to no longer shock deer. And when that happens the deer will soon come in as though the fence did not exist.

For such reasons people setting up long fences sometimes use 6 or more charged wires 8 inches to a foot apart. These are thick (at least 14 gauge) galvanized steel wires stretched taut with about 150 pounds of tension and anchored strongly at the gate openings and corners. This arrangement works well. But it costs about half as much as a strong barrier fence. And if anything (a falling tree branch, weeds, lightning) neutralizes the electric charge, the deer will soon zip through the fence as if it wasn’t there. That’s why many of those in need of such a fence opt instead for a strong barrier fence — something that can have its own maintenance problems, but which overall is much less prone to fail.

[fenceblog]

What Are My Deer Fence Options?

You have three basic options—electric deer fences, barrier deer fences, and combinations of the two.

Let's look at electric fences first. The simplest kind is a one-wire fence with the wire typically being baited (attracting deer to it) and placed at a height of about 3 feet. Even if the deer don’t learn to duck under or leap over this wire, they may jostle it enough to pull the wire out of an insulator or do something else to neutralize the fence. Similar problems afflict multi-wire electric fences. And if one gets really determined by putting up a fence say six feet high with wires starting at 1 foot so that the deer cannot get underneath the fence, then weeds may drain power off the lowest wires, neutralizing the fence and rendering it vulnerable to penetration by the deer. For all these reasons, stand-alone electric fences should be regarded as a possible option well below the cost of a barrier fence, but one that is not fully reliable.

Another option is a polypropylene barrier fence using professional grade deer fencing, most of it made by the Tenax Corporation. If one includes the labor needed to set it up, this is quite a lot more expensive than an electric fence. And if one fails to maintain it—such as by removing fallen tree limbs and patching up small holes gnawed by woodchucks or rabbits before the deer find them—this fencing may also be penetrated by the deer. Or if a deer should decide to charge the fence head-on, no matter how strong the polypropylene, there is a reasonable chance the deer will break it. To deal with all of this, one may choose to install the best deer fence, which uses fencing made of metal hexagrid — equivalent to a stiff small-mesh galvanized chicken wire coated with black pvc. That yields a better, stronger, and longer-lasting fence, but one that is quite expensive.

To reduce costs, especially around orchards and gardens, I like the option of a combination fence. Set up a barrier fence using Tenax’s Standard (C-flex) polypropylene deer fencing. Arrange things so that you can go three feet outside this fence. Then, if the fence can’t do its job (because deer break into it, with or without the assistance of holes gnawed by small animals), install an electric fence wire three feet out from the barrier fence at a height of about 3 feet above the ground. It’s easy to see if the electric fence is working (the light on the charger tells you that), and maintenance is also easy (typically a matter of minutes). Meanwhile, the barrier fence is still intact, so the deer will be kept out. I don’t say that this offers a perfect answer, but it is an attractive option for those seeking to exclude deer with a modest budget.