BuzzSkito Mosquito & Tick Control Specialists · Published August 22, 2026
What Is the Best Deer Fence for a Canadian Garden?
Seven feet of UV-stabilised black polypropylene netting, on posts every ten to twelve feet, with a tensioned top line and a bottom edge staked to the ground. That is the answer for the overwhelming majority of Canadian gardens, and everything below is either how to get that right or the specific cases where something else is correct.
What makes deer fencing unusual is how binary the outcome is. Most pest and wildlife products give you partial results — a repellent reduces damage, a deterrent works for a while. A deer fence either exceeds the threshold the animal will commit to, in which case damage stops completely, or it does not, in which case you have spent several hundred dollars decorating the path they were already walking. There is very little middle ground. That is why the height number and the bottom edge get the attention here and the brand name gets almost none.
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Why 7 ft Is the Number (and the Three Times It Is Not)
A healthy white-tailed deer clears a six-foot fence from a standstill. Not a determined deer, not a spooked deer — an ordinary one, in the course of a normal night. Six-foot netting is sold in volume because six feet is the height people expect a fence to be, and it is the most expensive mistake in this category: it costs nearly what seven-foot netting costs, takes exactly the same weekend to install, and does not work. If your budget only reaches six feet of a premium product, buy seven feet of a cheaper one.
Eight feet is genuinely better where you can get it, for one Canadian reason that most guides written for milder climates never mention: snow raises the ground. Two feet of settled snowpack against a seven-foot fence leaves a five-foot obstacle, and it does so in the exact months when browse pressure is worst and a deer has the strongest reason to try. If the thing you are protecting is a cedar hedge, a young orchard, or shrubs that matter in winter, build to eight.
Three situations legitimately allow less height:
- A small enclosed plot. Deer are reluctant to jump into a confined space where they cannot see a landing and an exit. Around a compact vegetable garden — call it under four hundred square feet — five to six feet often holds, because the constraint is psychological rather than athletic. Around an open yard, the same five feet is a stepping stone.
- A slanted fence. A single fence leaned outward at roughly forty-five degrees presents a wide obstacle rather than a tall one, and deer judge it poorly. Five to six feet of vertical height is enough when the lean gives you several feet of horizontal depth.
- A double-row fence. Two parallel fences of five feet, set three to five feet apart, exploit the same weakness. Deer will not commit to a jump they cannot see themselves clearing and landing beyond. This is also the standard workaround when a municipal by-law caps your fence height.
Deer Barrier Options Compared
Here is the honest comparison, with a live Amazon.ca availability check for the options worth buying.
| Option | Height needed | Ontario winter | Best for | Check availability |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 ft poly deer netting | 7–8 ft | Good — re-tension after heavy snow | Gardens, hedges, whole-yard perimeters | Check price → |
| Bulk netting (330 ft roll) | 7–8 ft | Good — fewer seams to fail | Property lines, orchards, acreage | Check price → |
| Welded-wire metal deer fence | 7–8 ft | Excellent — permanent | Dogs, bears, machinery, falling branches | Check price → |
| Slanted or double-row layout | 5–6 ft each | Good — low profile sheds snow | Where a by-law caps height; wide lots | Check price → |
| Electric wire fence | 4–5 ft, multi-wire | Mixed — grounding suffers in frozen soil | Orchards and plots you can maintain weekly | Check price → |
| Repellent sprays | n/a | Poor — washes off, habituation | A few specimen plants; a stopgap season | Supplement only — not the plan |
The Specification That Actually Matters
Three things on the label are worth reading. Everything else is packaging.
UV stabilisation. This is the one people skip and regret. Polypropylene left unprotected in sun degrades, and Ontario delivers the double insult of strong summer UV and repeated deep freeze-thaw. UV-stabilised black netting stays flexible for many seasons; the cheap unstabilised stuff goes chalky and shatters when you touch it in year two, usually in the middle of winter when you cannot do anything about it. If a listing does not say UV-treated or UV-stabilised anywhere, assume it is not.
Breaking strength. Deer netting is sold in grades, and the number on the roll is a breaking-load rating. Light grades are fine for a seasonal vegetable enclosure. For a permanent perimeter that will take snow load, branch fall, and the occasional deer that hits it at speed before learning it is there, buy up a grade. This is the specification where paying more genuinely buys years.
Mesh size. Standard deer netting runs around a two-inch mesh, which is right for deer and useless against rabbits and groundhogs. If those are also on your list, add a two-foot band of smaller-aperture mesh or hardware cloth along the bottom of the run rather than buying fine mesh for the whole seven feet — fine mesh over the full height catches snow like a sail and doubles your load.
Posts, Spacing and the Top Line
The single most common install error after height is treating the netting as if it were the fence. It is not. The netting is a skin; the posts and the top line are the structure, and the mesh carries almost no load of its own.
Set line posts ten to twelve feet apart, closer on corners, gates and any run crossing a slope. Beyond about fifteen feet the mesh bellies between posts, and a belly is just a lower fence with extra steps. Buy posts long enough that after driving eighteen to twenty-four inches into the ground you still have your full height above grade — for a seven-foot fence that means eight and a half to nine feet of post. Sandy or soft ground wants more depth; the spring thaw is when under-driven posts lean and take a whole run with them.
Then run a tensioned top line — a poly rope or coated cable — from post to post, and tie the netting to that line with UV-rated cable ties. This is what holds the height. Without it the mesh sags between posts within a season and you are back to an effective five and a half feet. Corner posts take all the tension in the system and deserve to be heavier, driven deeper, or braced.
The Bottom Edge Is Where Deer Actually Get In
Ask anyone whose deer fence failed and they will describe a jump. Walk the fence line and you will usually find a scrape, a pushed-up corner, and a worn track underneath. Deer go under before they go over, because it is easier — they drop to their front knees and shove. Once one animal finds the gap, the group learns it within days.
So the bottom is not a finishing detail, it is half the fence:
- Pin every three to five feet with heavy landscape staples or ground anchor pins. Light-gauge staples pull straight out of wet spring soil.
- Follow the contour, not a straight line. Every dip, swale, ditch and low corner is a gap. Push the mesh down into them or fill with stone or timber.
- Leave slack at the bottom. An extra foot of netting laid flat on the soil and staked down is the strongest version of this: grass grows through it over a season and locks it in place permanently.
- Check gates hardest. A gate is the one part with a designed gap. Overlap the mesh generously and stake the ground on both sides.
Build It in Autumn — the Ontario Timing Argument
The instinct is to fence in spring when the garden goes in. The better window in southern Ontario is late August through October, and there are three separate reasons that all point the same way.
First, browse pressure is a cold-season problem. Deer eat what is available, and what is available collapses through late autumn. Eastern white cedar is the classic Ontario casualty — a hedge that looked untouched all summer gets stripped to a clean browse line at deer-head height over one winter, and cedars do not regrow from bare wood, so that damage is permanent. Fruit trees, yews and shrub beds go the same way. A fence built in May protects lettuce; a fence built in October protects the expensive plants.
Second, you need unfrozen ground. Driving nine-foot posts into frozen southern Ontario soil is not a job you want; once freeze-up arrives you are waiting until spring. Autumn also gives you honest sightlines — with the summer growth died back you can actually see where the ground dips and where the deer trails cross your line.
Third, autumn is when deer are moving most and establishing the routes they will use all winter. A fence that goes up before those routes set is a fence they route around rather than one they have to be broken of.
If you are already past freeze-up and losing plants now, do not build badly in frozen ground. Protect individual plants over the winter — burlap wraps, wire cages on young trunks, netting draped over a hedge — and build properly the following autumn. Deer fencing components are stocked seasonally at Canadian Tire, Home Depot, Rona and rural farm-supply retailers, and available year-round on Amazon.ca, which is often the only route once the seasonal aisles have flipped to Christmas.
By-Laws, Neighbours and the Version That Gets Approved
Ten minutes of checking before you order three hundred feet of netting. Many Ontario municipalities cap residential fence height in the rear yard at roughly two metres, and lower in the front yard — a seven-foot deer fence sits above that. What usually saves the project is that by-laws frequently treat open garden enclosures, agricultural fencing and seasonal netting differently from a solid privacy fence, and black poly mesh you can see straight through is genuinely a different object from a board fence. Call, describe it accurately as garden netting on posts, and ask.
If the answer is no, this is exactly what the slanted and double-row layouts are for: two shorter runs, or one leaned outward, that stop deer without exceeding the height cap. And if you share a property line, tell the neighbour before the posts go in. Black netting is close to invisible from twenty paces, which is the strongest argument you have.
When the Cheap Option Is the Right One
Not every deer problem is a perimeter problem, and it is worth saying plainly that plenty of readers should not buy 330 feet of anything.
If the damage is confined to a single vegetable bed, a five- or six-foot enclosure around that bed alone is both cheaper and more effective than a tall perimeter, because of the confined-space reluctance described above. If you are protecting three young trees, three wire cages beat a fence outright. If you are renting, or the problem is one season while a hedge establishes, seasonal netting draped over the plants and staked down is a legitimate answer.
Where the cheap option is not correct: an open yard with a real deer trail through it, a cedar or yew hedge you would be sad to lose, an orchard, or anywhere you have already tried repellents and watched them stop working in February. Those are perimeter problems, and a perimeter problem does not get solved by half a fence.
Deer, Ticks and Why We Care About This at All
We are a mosquito and tick company, so the reason deer are on our radar is not the hostas. Adult blacklegged ticks feed and mate on white-tailed deer, and a deer that walks a property every night is a delivery system dropping engorged females into the beds and lawn edges. Excluding deer from the part of the yard your family uses removes one of the main ways ticks arrive on the property in the first place.
The honest limit is that it does not clear what is already there. Ticks established in leaf litter and along the lawn-to-brush transition persist on their own, carried by mice, chipmunks and birds that walk straight under any deer fence. So a deer fence is one layer. Clearing leaf litter, keeping a hard edge between lawn and brush, and treating that transition zone is the other — our guide to keeping ticks out of an Ontario yard covers the landscaping side, and the blacklegged deer tick in Ontario explains why the deer connection matters at all. For properties in the GTA, our tick program runs five applications across the May-to-September season, targeted at that transition zone rather than the open lawn.
Deer Fencing — Key Facts
| Minimum working height | 7 ft vertical — 8 ft where winter browse matters |
| Why 6 ft fails | A healthy white-tailed deer clears it from a standstill |
| Snowpack effect | 2 ft of settled snow = a 7 ft fence becomes 5 ft |
| Material for most gardens | UV-stabilised black polypropylene netting |
| Post spacing | 10–12 ft; closer on corners, gates and slopes |
| Post length | Fence height + 18–24 in of burial (8.5–9 ft for a 7 ft fence) |
| Top line | Tensioned rope or cable — the netting is not structural |
| Bottom edge | Staked every 3–5 ft, following the ground contour |
| Most common failure | Deer pushing under a loose bottom edge, not jumping |
| Low-height exceptions | Small enclosed plots; slanted or double-row layouts |
| Best install window (Ontario) | Late August–October, before ground freeze |
| Check before buying | Municipal fence by-law height cap (often ~2 m rear yard) |
| Tick relevance | Deer carry adult blacklegged ticks onto the property |
Frequently Asked Questions
How tall does a deer fence need to be in Canada?+
Seven feet is the working minimum for a vertical fence, and eight is better if you can get it. A healthy white-tailed deer clears six feet without much effort — a six-foot fence is the single most common and most expensive mistake in this category, because it costs nearly as much as a seven-foot fence and does not work. There are two legitimate exceptions. A small enclosed plot (roughly under 400 square feet) can often be held at five or six feet, because deer are reluctant to jump into a confined space where they cannot see a clear landing and exit. And a slanted or double-row fence works at five to six feet by exploiting poor deer depth perception — the animal reads the width as part of the obstacle. In Canada there is a third factor most guides skip: snow. Two feet of settled snowpack turns your seven-foot fence into a five-foot fence exactly when winter browse pressure is at its worst.
Is poly deer netting strong enough, or do I need metal fencing?+
UV-stabilised polypropylene deer netting is strong enough for the great majority of Canadian garden and yard perimeters, and it is what most people should buy. Deer are not trying to break through a fence — they are testing whether they can go over or under it. Netting works because it is a visual and physical barrier at a height they will not commit to, and because black mesh nearly disappears at twenty paces, which is why homeowners actually agree to install it around a yard. Metal welded-wire deer fencing is the better choice in three situations: where large dogs, bears, or heavy machinery will contact the fence, where you want a genuinely permanent structure you never take down, and where falling branches are a routine problem. Metal costs several times more per foot and needs proper braced corner posts. If your problem is deer eating hostas, cedars, tulips and vegetables, netting is the right tool.
Why do deer get under my fence instead of over it?+
Because going under is easier, and most fences are built with all the attention at the top. Deer will drop to their front knees and push under a loose bottom edge before they will attempt a jump, and once one animal finds the gap the whole group uses it. The fix is unglamorous: pin the bottom edge of the netting to the ground every three to five feet with heavy landscape staples or ground anchor pins, and follow the actual contour of the ground rather than running a straight line over dips. Any low spot — a swale, a ditch line, a gap where the ground falls away under a fence run — needs the netting extended down into it or a length of stone or timber laid along the edge. On uneven ground it is worth leaving an extra foot of netting at the bottom and letting it lie flat on the soil, staked down, so grass grows through and locks it in place.
When is the best time to install a deer fence in Ontario?+
Late summer through October, and there are three reasons. First, deer browse pressure climbs sharply as natural forage dies back — the damage that kills a cedar hedge or strips a shrub bed happens through late autumn and winter, not in July. Second, you need unfrozen ground to drive posts; once the ground is locked in southern Ontario you are done until spring. Third, doing it in autumn means the fence is up and settled before the first real snow, and you can see how the ground contours actually run once the growth has died back. If you are already past freeze-up and losing plants now, the honest interim answer is physical protection on the individual plants — burlap wraps, wire cages around young trees, netting draped over a hedge — and a proper fence built the following autumn.
Will a 7 ft deer fence break my municipal fence by-law?+
It might, and it is worth ten minutes of checking before you buy 330 feet of anything. Many Ontario municipalities cap residential fence height in the rear yard at roughly two metres and lower again in the front yard, and a seven-foot deer fence sits above that line. The nuance that usually saves the project is that by-laws often treat an open garden enclosure, agricultural fencing, or temporary seasonal netting differently from a solid privacy fence — and a black poly mesh that you can see straight through is a very different object from a six-foot board fence. Call your municipality, describe it accurately as garden netting on posts, and ask. If the answer is no, the slanted or double-row layout is the standard workaround: two shorter fences, or one leaned outward at an angle, that stop deer without exceeding a height cap.
Does poly deer netting survive a Canadian winter?+
Good netting does, with two honest caveats. Buy UV-stabilised black polypropylene — the UV package is what stops the mesh going brittle and shattering after two or three seasons of Ontario sun and cold, and it is the difference between netting that lasts a decade and netting that lasts eighteen months. The first caveat is snow load: heavy wet snow and ice can drag netting down, especially where it crosses a dip or where drifting piles against it, so expect to walk the fence line after big storms and re-tension. The second is the snowpack maths above — the fence gets shorter as the snow gets deeper. Some people take seasonal runs down over winter, which is exactly backwards for deer protection. A better answer is to build to eight feet where winter browse is the actual problem, and to accept that a garden fence protecting summer vegetables can come down while a fence protecting cedars and fruit trees must not.
Do deer repellent sprays work instead of a fence?+
They work partially, temporarily, and only while you keep reapplying them — which makes them a supplement, not a substitute. Odour and taste repellents can reduce browsing on treated plants, but they wash off in rain, dilute in snowmelt, need reapplication as new growth appears, and lose effect as deer habituate or as winter hunger overrides the deterrent. A hungry deer in February is a far less fussy animal than the same deer in June. The pattern that holds across every wildlife problem is the same one that shows up with raccoons: anything that only signals unpleasantness gets called as a bluff eventually, while anything that changes physical reality keeps working. Use repellents to protect a few specimen plants, or to buy a season while you plan the fence. Do not use them as the plan for a garden you actually care about.
Does fencing deer out reduce ticks in my yard?+
It helps, and it is a real reason to fence rather than a marketing angle. Adult blacklegged ticks feed and mate on white-tailed deer, so deer moving through a property every night are the delivery mechanism that drops engorged females into your landscape beds and lawn edges. Excluding deer from the part of the yard your family actually uses removes one of the main ways ticks arrive. What it does not do is clear the ticks already established in the leaf litter, the wood line, and the shaded lawn-to-brush transition zone — those persist for years on their own, carried around by mice, chipmunks and birds that walk straight under any deer fence. So treat a deer fence as one layer. Clearing leaf litter, keeping a hard edge between lawn and brush, and treating the transition zone is the other layer.
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