Over the past several summers I have used this space to complain about the challenges of growing vegetables, fruit trees or even certain kinds of flowers in a rural area inhabited by deer.

I might have framed that statement differently, saying instead that the rural areas have become “overpopulated by deer,” but I suspect that from the deer’s point of view, the countryside contains far too many people. If the deer could be polled, they undoubtedly would give us low marks for driving cars on the roads that cut through their habitat but high marks for planting tasty stuff for them to eat, serving it up in a confined space where it’s easy to find, and being thoughtful enough to lock our dogs up at night so they can dine in peace.

As it happens, my own approval rating with the deer is now at an all-time low. After years of experimenting with the low-tech alternatives, I have finally installed an electric fence. Now the pleasant sounds that punctuate an evening stroll around my garden include not only the chorus of frogs in the nearby pond but the reassuring click-click-click of a battery-powered, low-impedance controller, pulsing its voltage along a wire around the top of my garden fence.

It’s music to my ears. As I was snapping the insulators onto the posts and running the wire around the circuit, I secretly hoped that the deer herd or at least the scout sent ahead to reconnoiter the evening meal was watching from the hedge row.

“This is for the lettuce in ’96, the beans in ’97, the okra and cucumbers in ’98 and ’99, and just about everything I planted in 2000,” I seethed. “No more free lunch.”

For me, this was a last desperate act, the culmination of all those heart-breaking disappointments and 12 months of plotting my revenge. Suddenly, every friendly thought I’d ever had for wildlife seemed like the hollow gesture of a hypocrite. I didn’t care, and it felt wonderful.

Last summer, when I had a little time on my hands because the deer had left me so little garden to tend, I stopped and had a chat with Darrell Shuck, whose lush vegetable garden I admire every day on my way to and from work. On my way home in the evening I also frequently see a herd of seven or eight deer near his house. But the garden that he and his wife tend, the deer leave very much alone.

The Shucks’ garden is unfenced except for a single wire strung among pieces of rebar sticking about 30 inches out of the ground. A person can step right over it to go in and out of the garden; clearly the height of the wire itself would create no obstacle for even the most lethargic deer.

This intrigued me because I had heard in one of my many deer-bashing sessions with other beleaguered gardeners that an electric fence wouldn’t work if the deer could still jump over it. My garden has a permanent 5-foot fence, so I had thought that running a wire around the top wouldn’t keep the deer out.

The Shucks’ experience would tend to prove this theory wrong.

Apparently, the deer can sense the electric field that surrounds their garden, and they stay outside the boundary. Either that or the deer that dined in my garden were the same ones I saw near the Shucks’ house, and they were simply too full to eat again at their place.

In any case, I am now an initiated member of the high-tech predator control community. I know more about ground posts and insulators than I ever hoped. I know how far away from water pipes and telephone poles my fence must be. Like someone getting religion, I have studied the illustrated owner’s manual for my fence controller and have made mental notes of what to do and what not to do. When zagged lines appear near the hand of the farmer in these drawings and his cowboy hat jumps off his head, he’s not following the instructions. I have studied well.

Click-click-click. Now, bring on the deer.

When she’s not writing about foods and gardening, Gwyn Mellinger is teaching journalism at Baker University. Her phone number is (785) 594-4554.