Building fishing line fence?

Trying to create some aesthetically pleasing garden infrastructure to deter deer. I have recently harvested some fallen limbs that are about 10 ft in length and was curious about how to make a cheap and efficient fencing to deter deer from the garden. The only concerns i am curious about would be how it may look i am in the city right on a corner lot and cannot legally put a fence around my property but i can construct one around my garden i just want it to look nice the materials i am considering using are limbs of fallen hardwoods and fishing line. Has anyone constructed this and has anyone created a natural design that looks nice any pointers would be appreciated.

You might want to look up the "junk pole fence " thread here, and other threads on fencing.

By fishing line do you mean monofilament?  Your call, but be careful not to cause deer to get caught up in it or you will have a bunch of people after you.

Cattle panels or even rusty reinforcement mesh might be useful. This would keep the deer out and you can fasten your wood to it to disguise it .

Deer are a big problem many places now, especially suburbia. They even seem to stop look and listen before crossing the streets !  

My mom uses a fishing line fence to keep deer out, seems to work.  She just uses the skinny posts designed for electric fence and wraps a couple turns of fishing line around each pole.  She does two lines, one at about 18" and one around 3 foot high, I don't really think the low string is needed.

From a distance all you can see is the occasional pole sticking up.  I think that would look better and be less hassle than trying to use tree limbs.

Thank you i really want to get the deer pressure away from the more valuable annuals growing as far as the rest of the yard im starting a living wall of seabuckthorn and rosa rugosa to border the yard but this will take time to establish as time progresses i would like to get rid of the fence and have my yard protected in guilds with several intermixed herbacious and fruiting plants ie currants gooseberry raspberry strawberry lavender lemon balm bee balm echinacea .....hopefully that will create a safe place for my trees to grow up in but the veg garden will still need protection

Sounds like a good plan and quite the garden !  

I know around here they claim the deer eat the rugosa roses but I can't really believe it. The seabuckthorn is a great idea and a great plant. Do you mind sharing where you get the plants?  I had little success from seed on them.

Im actually growing them from seed i ordered the seed from incredible seed company based out of nova scotia canada.. the seabuckthorned needed 90 days of cold stratification in the refridgerator i did this in a bag of moist vermiculite then i put them in cells and kept transplanting until they went out ...they love sandy soil and full sun which works perfectly for me because the edges of my yard are full of sandy dirt and actually get alot of salt spray which seabuckthorn is very tolerant of in maybe another 4 to 5 years i will get fruit forming but until then its going to need to grow to become a nice hedge ...the rugosa i took hips from a near by wild bush and stratify the seeds in the fridge and grew them inside i also burried the hips in the ground around the edges of my yard and if they dont take ill just take several cuttings and sink them in the soil around the yard.

Awesome!

Thanks Jordan. I had some new England seed but the  2 plants I got froze to death. NS would be a better source for me as I'm in NB , next door. We have tons of rugosa growing wild on the coast at Saint JOhn. I have the native rose which has smaller hips but they are all great. Great food source. I boil the hips and strain them instead of trying to pick out seeds ahead of time as many do.
My ancestry is from Denmark and the seabuckthorn is native there. thats why I want to get it established. There are huge banks of it there all along the coast. The orange berries are vibrant looking and the almost bluish -green leaves are stunning as well. They also seem to stabilize the rather sandy soil.
You're right there. They grow right on the beaches so they certainly love sandy dry conditions and tolerate the salt. I see what you mean about tolerating road salt . Good call !

Thanks for sharing !

Yes well incredible seed company seems to put alot of care into what they do i used to live in lawrencetown oddly which is where they are located and i moved back to ontario after quite a few years ..i have to say the Maritimes is a great place to grow food the climate is amazing there..im in a interesting spot here in ontario im on the cusp of the boreal forests and the st lawrence south eastern hardwood forests soo the potential to grow things is amazing i have a big affinity for some of the more uncommon natives here and i really want to focus on getting some wild native trees established by guerrilla gardening them aka shagbark hickory chestnut and hazelnuts ..butternuts ...im even experimenting with trees that are not native like american persimmon ...the potential is here i really recommend you try incredible seed company they have some interesting seeds and you can tell they love what they dooo anyway good luck on the seabuckthorn im going to try keepin deer out of my garden.

Hi Jordan !

I went right to that site and was on there the last half hour, just amazed at what they have to offer !  I'm near Saint John , so I might even take the ferry to Digby and visit them. So thankful that you introduced me. They have seeds I have been trying to get without much luck such as asperagus and rhubarb plus so many good herbs and veggies etc . Well you know!
Interesting that you lived there. Ya pretty good climate here really, I'm in a microclimate on Kingston Peninsula which is moderated by the waters of two big rivers and the Bay of Fundy.
Sounds pretty interesting what you are doing with the plantings there. I have hazel on the property here and 2 butternuts my father planted. THat reminds me I have to cut away some other stuff around them this year.
The squirrels tend to get the hazelnuts most times, hard to beat them. But I do get up to 5-6 nuts per cluster on some of them  which is pretty good.
My pet project the last few years is propogating the Black Elderberry. Its easy to root. Just in water the cutting make tons of roots , so I have several hundred now.
I 'm also lucky enough to have lots of native fiddleheads on my property.
I also tend (prune) alot of other trees , especially ash . I have some white birch which really responded well to limbing . I love the bright trunks.
I will try the seabuckthorn again , even thought it might be  a crap shoot since they need the 3 month stratification. I realize now that the other seeds I had didn't recommend that, so that explains why I only got 2 plants.

Nice getting connected with you , and wish you a great season !  Thanks again for being so helpful !  I especially like their focus on Heritage varieties. Makes me want to support them as well as helping myself grow better crops !

You can find monofilament fishing line up to 400 or 500 pound test. From my experience they don't mind jumping quite high to get over a fence.

I tried the monofilament fence and it only worked for a couple weeks before the deer figured it out.  I think I used 30# or 50# line.  My hunch was that they saw dew on the line and figured it out.  

Thanks for the advice everyone I'm going to give the fence a try combined with other prevention methods like egg spray hot sauce and herbaceous plants like sage bordering the the area I'm hopefull but if it doesn't work ill have to think of other ways. Maybe noise a sprinkler.

The only two sure fire fences I know of for deer are a 6 foot to 8 foot tall privacy type fence. (deer won't jump over if they can't see the landing area)
The other is electric fence with dabs of peanut butter on it, the deer lick that once and never come back.
Deer will crawl under fences or jump over them, most deer can easily clear a 6 foot fence.

Redhawk

I've found that deer won't jump over a fence into a small garden. 16 feet has worked with a 5 foot fence. 35 foot by 35 foot doesn't work with a 9 foot fence. Two foot of chicken wire and seven feet of deer fencing. They felt so comfortable that they liked to sleep in that garden. So need to experiment with distractor wires inside a 35x35' garden, 2 thru the middle or one inside each side of the fence. I'm picturing a wire stretched from one side to the other, high enough so that it doesn't interfere with work under it. If you want to make it uglier you could hang cloth or foil from the inside line. You could also double use the inside line to hang lines from to grow cucumbers, beans, tomatoes etc.

Some of my neighbors have good luck just using repellents, but I'm not comfortable planting a fruit tree and having a deer browse it down after waiting 3 years to get my first fruit.

We put up another type of invisible fence.  The downside we discovered was that the fence killed a lot of birds.  They would fly through, and not realizing a fence was there, break their necks or wings.  It was rather horrifying, but probably preventable.

If I were to do it again, I would put up some sort of things to let birds know the fencing was there.  Not sure what... maybe bird tape?

You can buy 400 and 500 lb test monofilament in a variety of colors, pink, orange, yellow, the most visible is dark blue. I'd think in that diameter that it'd be visible even in clear, but I never handled anything over 50 pound test. And I never tried to judge how visible at night. But then you could go to 14 gauge stainless steel, or aluminum wire. Think grape vine trellis.