DeerBusters

Hi Kailyn!

So are you on the East Coast? Where are you at? 

I’m in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania!

Have you done a podcast before? 

I have done a lot of interviews but not podcasts?

Podcasting is amazing! I have an amazing audience I call them Green Future Growers cause they’re growing up a greener future!   I’m lucky cause I get to be the humble host and as a bonus I get to hear them first!” And sorry listeners I did this interview in January but it is just impossible for me to do anything extra during the school year!

Visit Deerbusters.com to learn about the importance of deer fencing in gardens to protect crops/flowerbeds, and the danger of Lyme Disease spread by deer. 

According to the National Center for Biological Information, a division of the National Institute of Health, the use of deer fencing has been proven to reduce the risk of Lyme disease by 83-97%. Without deer entering the area surrounding your home, new deer ticks become limited and eventually, existing deer ticks become scarce.

Deerbusters.com serves homeowners, gardeners and farmers alike with the highest quality deer fencing materials for lawns and gardens. Their mission is to deer-proof gardens; and that’s just what they do. Choosing a deer fence from Deerbusters means that homeowners will receive an easy to install deer fence kit with top-of-the-line fence parts. No professional installation required to build our deer fences.

Tell us a little about yourself.

I’m native to Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, which is where Deerbusters is located. I was born in Waynesboro… basically where I was raised. A few years ago, I joined the Deerbusters team.

I love being outdoors, gardening and hiking.

There are deer all over the place. Some of the problems we have.

I’ve never been there. It’s on my bucket list… southern states as far as lower VA. I haven’t been out west. I haven’t been out that way but I would love to come out sometime and see it. Definitely on my bucket list.

Another thing that I talk about with my listeners the Green Future Growers is I love Millennial, you sound like a millennial.  Are you a millennial?

Yes.

I live by Glacier National Park. There’s a great group on Facebook called the Glacier Gals that I found. It’s hard to get in sometimes, she only takes like 15 people but it’s great if you get to go!

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

My very first gardening experience I have to give a shout out to my pap! He is a huge gardener.

Every year he plants:

• tomatoes to beans
• apple trees
• everything you can think of he has

He basically taught me everything, he taught me the small things, believe it or not it’s kind of important to try.

Water Jug Auto Watering

• he uses old watering jugs
• basically uses a needle size hole
• puts a couple holes of the jug and 

sets it at the bases of his tomato plants works really well to 

• keeps them hydrated he learned that on his own from knowing over time 
• if it gets too hot and they get dry they would get  different spots
• love that he has for gardening grew on me

ever since I was little that’s what I basically started learning how to do.

How did you learn how to garden organically? Did you learn from him?

Basically yeah! I have to give him all the credit, my dad also gardens. We also have a small garden here at our house.

Basically we have some deer, that run around, behind our house we have a field and some woods. We did have to put a fence up around our garden as well.

When it comes to gardening organically, I’m not 100% not a professional, but I’ve definitely learned a lot from my pap!

Maybe he’d do an interview with me some day!

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

Absolutely between me and my neighbor we both have pretty decent size gardens. This year I tried growing a different kind of cherry tomatoes. Half of it is a more purple color then a red. I’m not sure what it was called maybe a cherry drop or something it was called

good and rich in flavor

first time I ever planted those kind

turned out really we’ll.

We also had a lot of luck with zucchinis this year

cucumbers

anything we normally try

Unfortunately, I’m trying to get my pumpkin patch, working on

The pumpkin patch

tried to grow one of the bigger varieties.

Pumpkins are tough..

I think the sun got a hold of it too much it wilted. 

My neighbor does grapes. It’s pretty cool see how that works…

I just starting to get into where people are starting to garden so my goal is to make a better  garden each year. I’m gonna aim for it. Plant as much stuff as I can and see what happens.

Is there something you would do different next year or want to try/new?

I’m gonna plant some fruits. I’m gonna plant some:

• strawberries
• grapevine like my neighbor
• raspberries
• apples

I want to get more into fruit. We planted some apple trees. Lots of different things hopefully will work out.

I always say if I was gonna start small I would start with 2 beds and a raspberry patch. I just love the raspberry patch so I think you will like that a lot. Mike planted 14 fruit trees a few years back and I am so impressed every year how much fruit we get!

Tell me about something that didn’t work so well this season.

Of course, everyone who plants a garden knows everything doesn’t always work. Normally something that does not too well. Obviously my pumpkin patch, this year. 

My peppers I believe did not work at all… I’m not sure what went wrong with that, none of them seemed to work…. so we had to say good bye peppers….

I’ve been surprised last year mike grew peppers in two different dirts and I was surprised how big a difference that made. A lot of my guests have talked about the importance of a soil test. They said that Eliot Coleman found he was missing some obscure element and that can make a big improvement on your success rate.

(Mike said one of his things is the problem of getting them to start because he uses a little terrarium to get them going.)

I’ll check it out maybe that was the problem?

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Let’s Get to the Root of Things!

Which activity is your least favorite activity to do in the garden?

Weeding part, we all don’t like weeding! So that has to be one of the worst!

The weeds if you don’t stay on top of them?! They seem to grow everywhere. Im planning on putting down some of the fabric stuff. 

Last year we did not have any of the fabric down so the weeds were overbearing! I spent so much time trying to pull all the weeds out! IDK mind the watering.  Harvesting is good too.

The planting part is probably my favorite to see everything grow…

It’s just the weeding part I’m not that big of a fan of!

I think we all feel that way about weeding especially when a bed gets away from us. I have had a lot of guests talk about their favorite hoe. 

What is your favorite activity to do in the garden.

Planting, just watching the stuff grow… after planting itself… watching it grow over time it’s just a weird satisfying thing… watching it and  knowing your doing a good job it’s obviously working if it’s growing and of course eating the stuff is one of the best things as well afterwords, then being able to eat what you get!

A favorite recipe you like to cook from the garden?

BLT, bacon lettuce tomato sandwich!

In the summertime after the tomatoes get ripe. That’s like my favorite things. I think I eat a BLT everyday!

What is the best gardening advice you have  ever received?

Don’t give up on it, people tend to plant and they’re all wound up in the beginning and once you get everything in the ground they stop caring for the garden as much.

Care for it from day one

Even in the winter time… still really important make sure it’s important that its taken care of throughout the year. It will definitely benefit you in the end… notice a huge difference…

My big goal is to grow enough sunflowers a year to feed the birds but I’m not anywhere near that.

A favorite tool that you like to use? If you had to move and could only take one tool with you what would it be.

Well, my favorite tool… oh my… this is gonna be weird, but I really like the tiller to till up the soil … just love the thing.. It’s awesome! I just like it. IT’s really big… I just like turing the soil up. if I had to choose one tool it would be the tiller!

A favorite internet resource?

Besides deerbusters.com for the company I work for. We also have another website.

mastergardening.com

We do have a gardening website. It has a lot of tools and tips.

If you have a second to get on there and check it out. I definitely recommend to read the blog.

I’ve been there before, I’ve seen them in Instagram or Twitter, I know I’ve been to this website before. Excellent! 

A favorite reading material-book, mag etc you can recommend?

A lot of different magazines, I forget what it’s called that does come out every year it that you can buy plants that you can actually buy out of the catalog

Have one around here because it has gardening stories, and some contain stories of people with deer problems and different tips. It has a yellow cover. 

Does it have the pictures? Is it the FedCo Catalog? 

It might be…

Seed catalogs in general is a great resource.

I like looking through it every year. To purchase stuff through that….

This would be a good place to talk about DeerBusters

We’ve been around for over 30 years…. started out as a cattle/livestock fencing company

1984… we’ve been around for a while we found out after about 10 years we started to get a lot of requests for deer fencing. The first couple that came thru we were like, there’s deer out there but we didn’t think it was that big of a problem at the time. But we found out that the more housing developments coming in the more forest taken away, the deer living in the backyard so that’s when lyme disease started to pick up.

We were getting so many requests about deer in our gardens and orchards and nursery. We found some products that seems  that were really great it spread nationwide.

deerbusters.com

people went crazy over this stuff so we’er selling it nationwide and in Canada

been great really well

• pollyfencing
• metal fencing steel hex web

that works good with smaller critters

• rabbits
• groundhogs
• anything small that

also munches on your garden

• welded wire fix not
• as well as parts, fence posts etc
• everything you would need for a successful system

Samples

Well do you want to talk a little more about this, you sent some samples, Mike’s response was hat the smaller chicken size, and there was some like we builds, he said that the nice part was it came in a kit as compared to what he did where he cut down the trees, and peeled the fence posts… and spent hours making the parts whereas this comes ready to put together.

Yes, it’s very

• customer friendly
• easy to install

I always say

“if I can do it, trust me you can”

I’ve been able to install a few for video purposes, to show people how is works. 

The posts are so easy to install, basically ground  first and the post goest into the sleeve goes into the ground first… then the post slides into the sleeve.

post

don’t have to dig really big holes

drive that ground sleeve into the ground

• makes it easy.
• home homers can install fencing in 2-3 days.
• polly material you might have seen in our sample packets.
• very lightweight
• aren’t too heavy but they are  durable
• standard starts at heavy duty
• ultra max which is the highest poly available now

650lb breaking strength works up to 1400 breaking strength per foot

Different metal fencing options

• steel hex web
• resembles a chicken wire
• galvanized and pvc coated

A lot of people use that not only for deer but also for smaller rodents that can be given a problem. Some people use poly at the top and put rodent barrier at the bottom.

Other people just use the steel hex web, we have it in 8 foot heights and 2 foot heights for the bottom. Depending on what you’re looking for

• welded wire
• which is galvanized
• which height
• 8 foot 2inch by 4” mesh
• as you go smaller the wholes seem to go farther as well.
• 3 foot fence for that has an inch and half, inch and half mesh size
• fix knot is the heavy duty stuff
• they weigh like 400 lbs each
• heavier material looking at 40 years for that

preference different products.

Customer Service

A lot of customers call us, they see our website and see we have different options.

Call and we’re more then happy to help! We’ll walk  you through what would be your best solution!

Nice! because definitely dealing with animals and rodents etc has been a very big problem. So it’s nice to have a solution that doesn’t include food poison or traps etc.

I just talked with someone who had this problem the other day. And for sure here in Montana we have lots of deer. My husband has definitely gotten frustrated fighting deer, and just he doesn’t even try to put in beds anymore that are outside the fence. When we first got married he had these like tents with like chicken wire on a small bed. And I also think about my mom finally got a fence for her dog and she didn’t want a fence for so long because she thought it would be ugly and I think this would have blended right in.

Invisibility

Absolutely, we do offer the poly steel hex, everything is virtually invisible to the eye

the fix knot is a little more outstanding, it’s galvanized it doesn’t have a pvc coating…

For the most part the

• poly material
• steel hex and
• really everything
• virtually invisible from 20 feet away

People who to put it around the garden. It definitely is a really friendly material to use. You’re not trying block out the neighbor or maybe you are are?

It’s virtually invisible you can see right through it. People don’t want to feel like a prison but you won’t feel that way because there’s a barrier there…

I guess I can just let people know we have a website Deerbusters.com

• request samples to see the material
• want to see the material
• idea of an area where you want to put a fence you can
• request a quote…

My number is 240-439-6685

Deerbusters toll free 1-888-422-3337

Anyone there would be more then happy to help you. I’m not the only one there so anyone who answers the phone are all very good. If you need anything just give us a call.

Final question-

If there was one change you would like to see to create a greener world what would it be? For example is there a charity or organization your passionate about or a project you would like to see put into action. What do you feel is the most crucial issue facing our planet in regards to the environment either in your local area or on a national or global scale?

Lyme disease – it’s terrible I do not want to see anyone go through it, I personally went through it. It’s very hard to go through. Thank goodness they caught it.  It didn’t really hurt me. The doctors said it was the closest thing to what I had

You can prevent it… deer fencing if you put it around your property is where you don’t want to

deer ticks… with deer fencing can prevent it with 83-97% with the fencing!

is affecting the north east and East Coast

if you do have deer, deer fencing is the best option to prevent that from happening. 

They do have sprays available  and different things…

deer fencing is the best thing!

It’s true, I have a lot of listeners in NY, that’s where my friend was when we were in college, he got a deer tick and was in the hospital for a long time, I wanna say like 3 weeks. 

Being a hiker, yeah it’s true!

Do you have an inspiration tip or quote to help motivate our listeners to reach into that dirt and start their own garden?

Yeah, you know when you look around you and see other gardens and see them really well put the bar a little bit higher every year. Just go out there, the initial putting your hand in the soil is what really gets you motivated. When you go out there and start doing the garden and you can imagine it a few months later when it starts flourishing

People listeners and following you… go have fun

Don’t be so serious about it, forget to have fun! If your having fun you will love it in the end… I think it’s so important to have fun these days because someday it will be to late… try new things with our garden! Go rock it!

How do we connect with you?

My number is 240-439-6685

Deerbusters toll free 1-888-422-3337

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