Tried everything to keep the deer off your supposedly deer-resistant plantings (and off that rose you snuck into your bed in a weak moment!)?

If you have deer, you know that most remedies aren’t all that effective, or they require so much, well, work, that it hardly seems worth it. Yes, we could be all super-responsible and only plant the things that they don’t like to eat, but it seems like their tastes change every few years – and anyway, what kind of life is it if we are deprived of our lush, gorgeous roses?

Enter the Nite Guard. It is a 3”, solar-powered black box that you set a foot off the ground. At dusk and through the night, it emits a red beam of light that looks like a predator’s eye and frightens the living daylights out of them, if the proprietor of my local feed store is to be believed. If you have a square property, you need four – one for each corner so that any place the deer enter, they can see one of the lights “looking” at them. Every so often you move the lights around a bit, so they don’t get used to them.

I’ve been having issues with raccoons getting at my beloved chickens and even stalking my year-old cat, so when I read that the Nite Guard works on raccoons as well as deer, I was excited.

The Nite Guards are $25-30 apiece, which sounds pricy until you consider how much money you’ve lost replacing plants that were supposed to be deer-resistant but weren’t, or how much you spend on those sprays that you have to fuss with.

Anyone try these yet? How have they worked?

Update 6/09 Outdoor Motion Lighting has a post up about the Nite Guard too, suggesting they may also be good for keeping pests from bird feeders.