Choosing a repellent to keep a pest animal away from your property can be intidating in making a choice and frustrating when you get the results. Animal repellents are, like insecticdes, only effective if they are applied exactly the way described on the label. So no matter what you buy, do not do anything different than what is recommended on the label.
No One Repellent Does The Job
While the label of some products indicated that the enclosed repellent will work for months, the experience of most folks is that most repellents, even if applied correctly, will be effective for no more than two or three weeks.
The secret then is to use more than one repellent every two or three weeks.
Aggravate the Critter!!
If you want to repel a pest animal from your property, we recommend using the strategy to aggravate the pest animal so much they decide to avoid your property just because it is too much of a hassle. What you must do is insult two or three of the different senses of the deer (smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing) on a rotating basis - every two to three weeks. You would use a smell repellent for two weeks, then use a taste repellent for two weeks, and a sound repellent for two weeks. After a month or two of this harrassment, there is evidence that the pest animal just leaves you alone because you are too much trouble.
In this section of Yardener's Tool Shed, we give you a large number of repellents and have organized them in terms of the target animal and then in terms of the various senses of the animal. Experience by those that have tried this aggravation system find that it takes insulting 3 to 5 of the senses over a period of 6 to 8 weeks and then the pest animal disappears.
Only a few pest animals such as deer, rabbits, and moles have a selection of different types of repellents. Some animals have no commercial repellents available. One of the problems is that many of the companies think it is wonderful to combine two senses in their product by making a repellent that smells bad and tastes bad; they eliminate the ability to vary the sense aggravation every two or three weeks.
What To Look For
All the repellents listed in this web site have been determined by us to be legitimate products that have been tested to work.
If the repellent is a liquid, you want one that will stay effective as long as possible. Those that make it through a rain are better than those that need to be replaced after every rain.
Some repellents come in ready-to-use form in a spray bottle. These work fine if you are trying to protect a relatively small number of plants. If you have a lot of plants to protect you should look for the products that come in concentrated form to be mixed with water.
