Perhaps now is a good time to take another shot at Bambi. Not literally, but to reexamine the problems deer cause in many of our gardens and to plot strategies to lessen their impact.

The deer's natural behavior offers us several opportunities to outsmart them. Plant selection can also be used to possibly direct the deer to a neighboring field or yard. Today we will talk mostly about the behavior and save most of the plant selection for a later article.

First, deer are creatures of habit. Unless spooked they will travel the same trails and most likely enter and exit your garden at the same spots. If we can interrupt that pattern you can get some relief.

Our options here are barricades or repellants. Before I ramble off let's make the second point. Deer are wild animals and thus are constantly on alert for danger. Their nose is their chief weapon of defense. Jam that receptor and they may look for safer hangouts. Repellants and plant selection can help here.

You have several options with barricades. Surround the venerable parts of your property with thick hedges of plants that they do not like. Another option is fencing. It takes either one very tall one or two short ones spaced so that the deer cannot land in between them.

Recently I read a claim by a gardener that he used loosely rolled hoops of loosely woven fencing wire to block them. His claim was that they would not cross for fear of entangling their feet. Don't know. Never tried it but I suspect that if that modified their behavior early in the spring it could double as a trellis for annual vines and still get season long help with the deer problem.

Repellants depend on odor. My experience of most commercial repellants is that they remind of a skunk who can change his scent. They are hardly welcome in my garden.

They work if they are renewed on a regular basis. Time and wet weather quickly reduces their effectiveness. A more tolerable repellent is human hair. I've had good success here with a faithful schedule of scattering.

There are also some pungent plants that will offer the same results on a season long basis. In another article we will tackle these and identify plants that the deer consider salad and those that they generally avoid.

When the deer are very hungry they will eat anything. Other times we have a chance to coexist. Think of it not as a war but as a series of many small battles, most of which can be won. Victories are a lot easier to obtain in the late winter and early spring. Deer feeding habits in the middle of the gardening season are tough to break.