HOw To IRISH SPRING SOAP DEER REPELLENT

OK...here is something we're going to try.  Regular blog readers will know we tried Irish Spring soap as mouse deterrent and the results were inconclusive.  We have no mice, knock on wood, but that could have been the soap, the mousetraps, the lack of food in the house or maybe even a snake or two.

Irish Spring soap as Deer repellent 

But then I read that it is a deer repellent.  Really?  OK, worth a try I suppose.  I bought some Irish Spring soap, original scent, and proceeded to cut it up into smaller chunks.  We had these muslin drawstring bags from a previous project.  After cutting the pieces, I put a few into each bag and tied it shut.  The strings are long so...

...I hung a "sachet" in every tree.  This is what all the recommendations we found suggested.  Apparently deer don't like the smell and so you just hang them in the branches.  They've been there a couple of weeks now and when I go to water and the breeze is blowing, I can smell them.  We just hope the deer smell them and don't like it. 

Irish Spring soap sachet in fruit tree

This is going to be the ultimate test. Here are some plums, young and still growing, and the sachet is right next to them.  We'll see what happens.  If the plums stay "uneaten" it will be a success.

Of course if we end up with Irish Spring flavored plums, well that's a different story, LOL!

 

UPDATE 06/2018:

Epic fail.  Not sure if it slowed them or maybe stopped one or two but all the fruit was stripped from the trees sometime in the last week.  Not a 100% sure it was deer but a broken branch and some suspicious hoof marks in the ground tell us that the deer came to eat.

Any other suggestions?