deer problems

I wonder if anyone has a solution to deer in the garden. This is a bit of a unique problem in this part of the world. We can accommodate wombats and wallabies but deer are an introduced species. They are sambar deer native to the Indian subcontinent and are big animals. They seem to love apples and roses and now its winter have started to eat the flower buds off the winter kniphofia which we plant for the nectar eating birds as a winter treat. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
With thanks from Craig

The other morning I opened the front door to find a big buck looking me in the face, he had been eating our hostas.

Normally they stick to the roses, which I stopped by regular spraying with fungicide for blackspot, apparently it gives them a foul taste. My neighbor has tomatoes in the front yard and the deer were eating the leaves. He bought some concentrated coyote urine, and sprayed it around them. So far the deer have not returned, but it's also stopped the neighbors from walking by his house.

If you want to be traditional and Japanese there's always the shishi odoshi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishi_odoshi

And here's a how-to with a video: http://www.squidoo.com/bamboo-fountain

Big ones make a real "clunk" when they dump the water. If you have a public Japanese garden near you it is certain to have at least one of these clacking away somewhere.

Hee hee. We used to have a shishi odoshi in the garde. My sister gave it to us as a house warming present in 1994 and it lasted well through several years.

Until one year when the house sparrows discovered it made a fun plaything.

I kid you not, they'd sit on it and you could almost hear them going "wheeeeeee!" when it tipped up to empty. We never got a photo but it was highly entertaining.

Don't believe me? You couldn't make stuff like that up. Hilarious.

The University of Florida say that the only sure way to deal with deer is a dog trained to run them to your property line and no further. So far the only our deer bother is the Hibiscus and we like the deer better than the plants, (they grow back) so we don't mind.

Thanks for that, the shishi odoshi is an interesting one, thanks for that Jim. Its a 10 acre garden bordering on a very large eucalyptus forest so I suspect the only real solution is a fence. They have discovered the hostas also, when they ate big daddy they were highly unpopular lol. We might try the fungicide over the summer when its not raining so much. I suspect coyote urine may be a bit hard to track down here, I wonder if dingo could work lol.
Craig

Our Florida deer, some dogs are bigger, jump anything less than eight feet. (Two meters plus for the rest of the world)

Hi Billy I understand the fence has to be at least 2m, at another property I work at we had to fence the vege garden and started with a 1.5m fence which they just hopped over. I saw a couple of stags last week and they are pretty big animals.
With thanks from Craig

You can try a motion activated sprinkler... click here Sprinkler

Thanks for that John thats a great idea.
Craig