Composted horse manure used as a mulch around the roses has worked for me. But I love the singing fish idea!
Alas, composted horse manure does nothing for deer around here, and there’s no shortage of it either. But I adore that singing shark!
I have used Plantskydd (it’s recommended by the USDA), and it seems to work. It might work better if it were made with deer blood (it’s made with blood and a vegetable-oil sticking agent).
That is the good news–that it works and it lasts more or less the whole season.
The bad news also has two parts–it’s expensive (I had to pay $37+tax for a kilo of the powder, which makes two gallons and is not very easy to mix), and it has to be applied to new growth (which is a much greater problem with roses than with plants which don’t make several growth flushes per season).
Plantskydd does make the leaves look bloody awful for a few days, but the excess washes off into the soil, giving a slight nitrogen boost from the blood content.
Otherwise, I know of two very good methods to protect against deer if you can’t find a singing deer head: 1. Good fences (apologies to Robert Frost here–good fences make good neighbors of deer); 2. large and aggressive barking mammals.
Peter
Composted horse manure may work well during the growing season but I don’t know how well it would work here in the winter. But I can get lots of it as there are three horse farms within a mile of my house.
I can’t do anything now but I’ll probably put up a better fence around my rose garden this spring. That won’t help the roses I have in front of the house though.
Thanks,
Paul