🛑 Stop Deer 🦌 and Rabbits🐰 from Eating Your Plants #CaptainWingnut

Hello and welcome to my channel. Brad Wardle callsign Captain Wingnut. 7,000 feet up in the Highlander Mountains of Eastern Utah. Today I'm going to show you how to keep deer and rabbits from eating your garden, your plants, your trees. Yeah it's mid-October and we're planting more trees. This is planting time. If you don't know Cougar Ridge Ranch grows chestnuts and hazelnuts and so we're putting them in and I'm going to show you how we keep the deer from chewing them up and the rabbits from chewing them up. The rabbits will eat the base of them to eat the bark and the deer will chew the sticks and the leaves and everything else. So I'm going to show you what we do to keep the rabbits and the deer off. It's really easy and it's cheap and it's fun. All right let's get going. Okay so to keep rabbits from nibbling on plants and trees you can buy these expensive. Oh my goodness these are expensive. These are like six, seven dollars a piece. They zip tie together around the tree and keep deer and rabbits from nibbling. But I can't spend that for my orchard. What I do is I get poultry netting, chicken wire, and you want to get the one inch kind because if you have cottontails, we have cottontails and jackrabbits and uh so if you get cottontails and you have two inch chicken wire they can go right through it. They can just slip right through it and chew up the tree. They love to in the winter time nibble the bark of the tree and the deer do too. So this is what I use. We take 18 inches of one inch chicken wire and it's three feet tall and you just wrap it around and bend the little tabs so that it hooks together and it makes a round guard that goes over your trees and it's cheap. I mean this is like uh for for three foot right here this is like 50, 60 cents for this much chicken wire. We buy it in big rolls. We buy it in 150 foot rolls. But you can buy it at any hardware store. Pretty cheap uh yeah and and small rolls too if you just have a couple of things. So that's how we keep the rabbits from nibbling on the trees through the summer and the winter and uh it's fun. It's easy. Okay so for deer and this works for anything that you can use this anywhere. Deer if you're a hunter you know if you have to stalk deer you were taught you've learned that deer's noses are real sensitive and they can smell anything and anything that's out of the ordinary causes a flight syndrome in them and they're gone. So when when I'm bow hunting I actually take my clothes and put them in a bag in a zip big big zip bag and I actually put peat moss in that bag and let my clothes absorb the smell of dirt because dirt doesn't alert them. Dirt's all around them so they're not alerted by dirt. But perfumes you don't want to wear deodorant. You don't want to use a cologne. You want to you want to smell as much like the earth when you're hunting deer as possible because of their their fright of smells. So their noses are real sensitive and so we use that to our advantage with the orchard and and you can use it to your advantage in your garden and your plants around your homes. You can do this this works really really good. What we do is we go down to the one dollar store and we buy these packs of this is palm olive this time. It's very perfumey and it's a three pack of palm olive and I just take a drill and drill straight down through the three pack and remember three pack for a dollar that's pretty good that's 33 and a third cents a piece. So I just take my drill and I just drill right down through the center of all three bars of soap. There you have it just like that and then I cut them apart and I take the one bar of soap and where's my twine hold the phone I gotta go find my twine. There we go it was out in the ranger we're working in the orchards. Okay so I just take I just take my twine you can get you can have a big spool of twine like this we're the ranch so we buy it in bales it comes two spools to a and you can get it at craft stores. I like this this plastic twine because it is absolutely weather resistant it goes through the sun sun doesn't degrade it the water the wind nothing degrades it so when we use this it just hangs tough. So I cut about an 18 inch 12 18 inch piece off and then this is where this is where you gotta this is where you gotta eat your Wheaties in the morning to make this happen. You just stick it on through and then I simply tie a knot in the end so it doesn't fray and then you knot this up on the bar of soap just put a square knot in there and then we've got we've still got a lot more that we got to go put on the trees. I'll take you out and show you that in a moment and this and you want to leave it in the box you want to leave it in its container so that it doesn't melt with the with the winter rain the summer rains you know you don't want it to melt from your sprinklers you want it to stay in there as much as possible boy but it's got a smell to it and tell you what the deer come walking in and they think they want to eat the leaves on our trees or the or the fruit or or nibble on the bark in the wintertime this sends them packing they go clear around the orchard they don't like this at all this is spooky to them so that's that's uh the the bar of soap trick it's cheap 33 cents and let's go show you how we put it on the trees and protect them so while we're on our way over to the orchard to show you how we protect our trees from rabbits and deer there are other ways most of them are just too expensive or impractical for us to use so let me talk about some of those some that work and some that don't if i had a nickel for every person who has told me that they bought some of those sprays that repel deer and rabbits and it didn't work i'd be an extremely rich man today uh they don't work they they uh they just don't work you can make your own spray that does work mix garlic uh garlic juice and and cayenne pepper and put that around your plants and that keeps the deer away the only problem with sprays and liquids like that is that at the first sprinkling from your hose from your sprinklers from nature it washes off and the deer come back uh yeah there's the chickens if you want to make your own spray uh you can mix a dozen scrambled up eggs not not cooked dozen raw eggs all whipped up mix a dozen eggs in five quarts of water and use that as a spray you can add garlic to that and you can add cayenne pepper to that and that repels well but again it washes off so so you can make you know people make call them deer crows uh you know scare the deer away uh they work for just a couple of days until the deer figure out that they're not a threat and they come in anyway especially hungry deer um there's things like blood meal blood meal works but it washes away and it's expensive uh you can plant some people say plant deer resistant plants but deer resistant plants are resistant to deer themselves typically they don't repel the deer uh you can use human hair you can put human hair in in socks and hang it from garden plants trees and that will repair the deer until the human scent wears off uh yeah there's a lot of things so uh we use uh chicken wire and soap the soap doesn't wash away it'll stay all winter long and sometimes we replace it for the summer and sometimes it still goes strong because it's in its box so let's go show you what we do and uh have some fun at it and then we just take our chicken wire this is a newly planted american chestnut tree and so they're endangered and we have to protect them real well and we just put this chicken wire around it like this and then the rabbits can't get to it to chew on the bark so i showed you this tree on the rabbit side it's got its rabbit fence on it and we've got our ready to go um soap bar of soap and all i do i just tie this bar of soap onto the chicken wire like this now the tree smells very perfumey and the deer don't want to come even near it they'll they'll they'll go they'll go out there and around of course there's there's an orchard over there too so they used to come right through here but with these in place they don't have anything to do with it so that's how you do it that's how you protect your your trees your shrubs your your plants from deer and from rabbits cheap really cheap all right brad wardle captain wingnut from cougar ridge ranch high seven thousand feet in the uintah mountains of eastern utah signing off thanks for watching let's do this again okay so first for rabbits you can you can buy never mind let's go get one so while we're on our way over to the orchard to show you the other so while we're on our way over to the orchard to show you all of the other ways that's no good huh