#arborvitae

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We put in a row of six arborvitae along the back property line four winters ago, mostly for privacy from the yard behind us. By the second February, three of them looked like someone had taken a hedge trimmer to the bottom half and stopped at exactly deer-nose height. I want to walk through everything we tried, in order, because most of what I read online before we started was either too vague to act on or clearly written by someone who had never actually dealt with a bad deer year.

First Attempt: A Repellent Spray From the Garden Center

We started with a basic repellent spray, the kind with an egg-based active ingredient, because it was cheap and available immediately. It worked for about three weeks. Then it rained twice, we forgot to reapply for almost a month because life got busy, and the deer were right back on the same three trees like nothing had happened.

The lesson here wasn't that repellent doesn't work. It was that repellent only works if you actually keep up with it, and we did not have the discipline to reapply every three weeks through an entire winter. If you are the kind of person who will genuinely stick to a schedule, it is a legitimate option. We are not that household.

Second Attempt: Netting, Which Was a Disaster

We tried wrapping bird netting around the worst three trees. This was a mistake. It looked terrible, it was a pain to install around the branches without damaging them, and one deer apparently got tangled trying to browse through it, which we felt genuinely bad about. We took it down within two weeks.

What We Almost Did Instead

Before landing on the fence, we seriously considered just replacing the three worst-affected arborvitae with something deer supposedly leave alone and treating it as a one-time loss rather than an ongoing fight. We got as far as pricing out boxwood as a replacement before deciding against it. Four years of growth on the existing trees, even damaged ones, was worth more to us than starting over with something smaller, even if that something would theoretically need less protection long term. That is a personal call, not a universal one, and I know at least one neighbor who made the opposite decision and is happy with it.

What Finally Worked: Fencing the Whole Row

What actually solved the problem was building a simple welded-wire fence around the entire row of six trees, not individual cages around each tree but one continuous barrier about seven feet tall. It is not attractive. It looks exactly like what it is, which is a fence protecting a hedge. But it has been up for two winters now and the arborvitae behind it have fully recovered their lower growth and look normal again for the first time since we planted them.

The cost was more than we wanted to spend at the time, more than a season or two of repellent would have cost. But we have not spent anything on repellent since, and we are not going to lose these trees, which is what actually mattered to us.

The Cost We Didn't Expect: Time, Not Just Money

Looking back, the thing we underestimated wasn't the price of any single option, it was how much of our own time the repellent phase quietly ate up before we admitted it wasn't working for us. Every three weeks through a New Jersey winter means going out in genuinely unpleasant weather to reapply spray to six trees, some of it in the dark since we both work full days. We kept telling ourselves we'd catch up on the schedule and kept not doing it, which is exactly the gap deer are opportunistic enough to exploit.

The fence, once it was up, required nothing from us. That's worth more than we gave it credit for when we were comparing sticker prices at the start. If I were doing this again, I would weight "will I actually keep up with this" much more heavily in the initial decision instead of just comparing what showed up on a receipt.

What We'd Tell Anyone Starting From Scratch

If you have a small number of high-value plantings in one area, fence the area rather than trying to protect individual trees separately. If your budget genuinely cannot support fencing right now, repellent works, but only if you are honest with yourself about whether you will keep up the schedule through an entire winter. And if a tree already has bark damage from antler rub rather than just browsed foliage, that is a different situation entirely worth getting an outside opinion on. We had one arborvitae with rub damage on the trunk that Middletown tree care looked at for us, and it turned out to be superficial enough to leave alone, which was a relief since we would have hated to lose that one specifically.

Things I Wish Someone Had Told Us Before We Started

Nobody mentioned that netting was a bad idea until after we'd already bought it, which is a small thing but would have saved us a wasted trip and an unpleasant afternoon untangling a confused animal. I also wish someone had told us up front that repellent effectiveness really does drop through the winter as deer under food pressure get more willing to tolerate a taste they'd have avoided in October, because we spent a while thinking we were doing something wrong with application technique when really the product was just working less well as the season progressed and pressure built. None of this is complicated information, it just isn't the kind of thing that gets mentioned on the product label or the garden center display, and we had to piece it together from a season of trial and error.

Resources That Helped Us Figure This Out

The Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station at njaes.rutgers.edu has actual research-based comparisons of repellent products rather than marketing claims, which is what convinced us the egg-based repellent we started with was a reasonable choice, just one that needed more consistency than we gave it. The NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife also has regional deer density information that helped us understand why our particular street, backing up to a wooded area, sees heavier pressure than streets a half mile away.

A neighbor of ours went through something similar with a row of yew along their driveway and ended up having Hufnagel Tree come take a look at rub damage on two of the older stems. Different company, same conclusion we got: not every rub scar means the plant is doomed, but it is worth having someone who sees this constantly tell you which is which.

Four winters in, the fence was the only thing that actually held up. Everything else was a temporary fix that bought us time to figure that out.

Photo by Hannah Reichert on Pexels

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