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Bone Sauce: A Tool for Deterring Browsing



Applying the bone sauce

Bone sauce is a product of the destructive distillation of bones — a process which separates the volatile organic components (aka bone sauce, or Dippel’s oil) from the inorganic components (aka bone char — mostly calcium, carbon and phosphorous compounds).

Bone sauce has a potent smell, somewhere between wood-creosote and rancid meat. When applied to the bole, branches, and shoots of dormant woody perennials it deters browsing by a range of herbivores. From wild animals like deer, elk and moose, to domestic stock such as sheep and cattle.

Keep in mind that bone sauce is proven to be effective with herbivore’s and not with generalists/omnivores such as a pigs or rodents.

For those working on a large scale, bone sauce is a fast, natural and highly economical way of protecting trees from browsing when compared with individual tree protection tubes or fencing.

When used in combination with thick rough woody-mulches to deter from physically getting close to trees, we have found bone sauce to be almost 100% effective in keeping herbivores off woody perennials. This is particularly true when there is plenty of other herbaceous understory plants for them to eat.

We have utilized bone sauce on a range of plants including Malus, Prunus, Morus, and Sambucus genus trees, walnuts and chestnuts, honey and black locust, willow, sea buckthorns, currants, raspberries and and other berry-producing shrubs.

We have seen no evidence that species, genus, or family has any effect on the success of the bone sauce. Additionally, we have been able to dilute it 50/50 with sheep or goat tallow before applying with no loss of effectiveness.


Freshly squeezed bone sauce

Making the bone sauce

As was said above, bone sauce is a product of the “destructive distillation” of bones. That involves heating up the bones in the absence of oxygen to temperatures around 600-700°C, until most of the organic material has been “cracked” or melted out, leaving a black “bone char”.

I originally came upon this method of making bone sauce from Sepp Holzer’s Permaculture: A Practical Guide to Small-Scale, Integrative Farming and Gardening. Here I offer a process that evolved out of my experience making bone sauce from Sepp’s method, with materials commonly available on a modern farm.

Materials needed:

  • 2 large capacity, heat resistant vessels of about the same size (cast iron or ceramic pots work well)
  • metal mesh (chicken wire works well)
  • a quantity of bones
  • a shovel
  • a few arm-loads of dry fuel wood



Some junk pots I have used for bone Sauce. (Notice the whiteness of the bones — that is
bone-ash, a result of oxygen getting into the mix because the pot melted during the burn)

First, bury one of the vessels in the ground, to the lip. Pack the second vessel with bones and fit the metal mesh onto it.

Flip the second vessel over, on top of the buried one, so that the bones are sitting securely on the screen.

When the pots are situated, shovel and pack earth around the seam between the two pots to help ensure no air gets inside. It is important that air is excluded from the bone chamber because the volatile oils will tend to form gases which escape the reaction — thus, you get a lot less bone sauce and of a lot poorer quality.

Place the firewood around the pots. I have found the configuration shown below to be effective.



Split pine places around the pots, ready to be lit

A bit of water can be added to the bottom pot before it is sealed. The water helps to more effectively dissolve the volatile components, ultimately yielding more bone sauce. We’ve found that the addition of water has not been necessary in our case because we make bone broth with all our bones before they exit the kitchen, and are thus already well saturated with water.



Sheep fat and bone tar melting
on the wood stove.

Next, a fire is the lit around the pots, and allowed to burn to coals.

Sepp recommends burying the top pot with the coals after the fire goes out, and coming back the next day after the coals have cooled. We’ve had greater yields and more consistent results not burying the top pot with the coals, and instead doing a second burn after the first is finished. Both methods are worth exploring to see how your results vary.

You can dilute the resulting bone sauce 50/50 with animal fat (goat, sheep, cow and pig would work well) or leave it full strength. We have had no loss of effect by diluting it. Since we render all our sheep, goat and hog fat it is economical for us to use some of the less desirable fat for value-added resources such as bone sauce.

Applying the bone sauce

You can apply the bone sauce with a brush, or, if you are feeling brave, you can put on some gloves and apply it directly with your hands. Be aware that the smell lingers….

Important Note: Bone Sauce should be applied in the dormant season, before there is any evidence of bud-swelling and sap flow.


The left over bones from the process

If the bone sauce is applied too late into the winter, it can “burn” the forming leaf and flower buds, and cause them to either die, become deformed, or not emerge at all. Bone Sauce will also burn leaves, flowers and fruit so be prepared for winter application.

We have not had ill-effects when applied during the periods of full dormancy.



Applying the bone sauce

Apply it on all the areas of the tree that a deer (or whatever you are trying to discourage) can reach. We applied to all the branches we can reach from the ground, as well as the main trunk all the way to the ground.

The bone sauce needs to be applied anywhere the animals you are trying to deter could get their mouth on the plant, so that no matter where they put their mouth/nose, they encounter the sauce.

Beyond bone sauce

I believe that this treatment of bones yields a greater amount of value than merely grinding the bones as a soil amendment. As you have both the bone sauce as an animal browse deterrent, as well as bone char which is just as effective as a long term calcium and phosphorous soil amendment.

The bone char is also significantly easier to break up with simple tools like the top of a mattock handle or a sledge hammer. It is akin to the difference between breaking up wood and charcoal.

We’ve taken to pulverizing the bone char and mixing it in equal parts with sawdust from the sawmill and ground biochar from gasifiers and campfires. We then put it in a five gallon bucket and urinate on it for several weeks.


A mattock handle and bucket are simple and effective pulverizing tools

The mixture is then commonly incorporated into our vermicompost system and comes out the other end as a very nutrient dense, biologically active soil amendment which we feed back into our growing systems.

Bone char can also be used as a filtration medium similar to charcoal, and as a pigment for paints and plasters. The char can also be burned in the presence of oxygen to produce bone ash, which has similar use as a pigment and ceramic coating. There are many potential uses and probably still more to discover!

15 Comments

  1. Great article, thank you for sharing!
    I made exactly the same procedure, only diluted with olive oil instead, but the results were somewhat disastrous, maybe you can suggest why…
    The mixture was applied in dormancy, late autumn (20 trees, 3 year), an unusally cold winter followed. (south of Sweden)
    The following spring-summer all of the trees were severely affected, most died. It seems the bark-cambium was damaged in the areas of application (dried, with fungal growth)

    Maybe I was to liberal, maybe wrong timing, or too cold winter (though Sepp Holzer would have similar climate)
    Any clues?

    warm regards,
    Torbjörn Lundaahl

  2. I put bones in my pressure cooker and cook for about 3 hours at 10 lbs pressure. Came out a soft mush. Just make sure you put in enough water for the time needed. Very clean and didn’t smell bad at all.

  3. Hi all! Thanks for your comments!

    Torbjörn: I am not sure when you applied the bone sauce, but as I wrote in the article it is important that the plants are fully dormant, and have not yet began to swell the buds in preparation for leafing out. I’d try applying less to see if that makes a significant difference. And do so on only 1 or two trees to see if it works, in order to minimize more damage!

    I do not see how the temperature would make a difference with the bone sauce, but it could be that the trees where already susceptible to some kind of fungud before the application.

    I would also not be surprised if there was something with the olive oil that may have reacted poorly with the trees. But I have no evidence to support it.

    OR perhaps, you want to dilute the sauce even more to reduce it’s potentially acidic nature.

    Hope you have better results in the future!

  4. Thank you Andrew, I think you may be right about the olive oil…
    Vegetable oils turns to a hard, waxy surface after a while, maybe this caused a strangulation. With fat this would not happen.
    Anyway, I will make another experiment the coming winter
    Torbjörn

  5. I wonder if anyone has tried the bone preparation against wallabies or kangaroo. They both jump 6 to 9 feet high when they are in a bad day. With inspiration they reach olympic records in Australia. Seriously anyone got a clue how to protect from marauding wallabies ( they compete with us in particular for chicories that we love but also peanuts leaves, french parsley, gardenias… Thanks in advance for sharing.

    1. Hi Michel and Jude.
      I have seen the application of a non toxic treatment to deter wallabies and kangaroos called Sen-Tree. Developed by the Victorian Department of Agriculture it involves the spraying on of an egg yolk substance which is then sprinkled with some gritty sharp substance that those animals don’t like so they stop coming back. I asked them if it worked for possums but they wouldn’t try it out on them. I suspect it would. It did cost about $300 for the smallest amount (which is actually a huge amount) but it keeps as it is in powder form and you can make it up in quantities to suit.

  6. Nice article. How ong does it stay effective after application. I’m using commercial deer repellent that is just rotten eggs in water, very effective but it has to be applied monthly

  7. Hello,

    I am also wondering how long this treatment lasts. I know Sepp Holzer says that it lasts indefinitely but what has been your experience?

  8. I made a batch of bonesauce last year in the same way as you did. Had great succes, I used it without diluting it and applied it to all but two of our fruit trees in winter and only the two were visited by deers

  9. Hi
    I realise this thread is 1 1/2 years old, but maybe someone will read this: I wondered if anyone has experience of this deterrent used for trees before planting out? We usually plant whips of 20-40cm, upland Scotland, high deer pressure. Would love to experiment with this treatment by maybe dipping/painting seedlings before planting them out…?

  10. What can I use for raccoons? I ordered before I read this. Now thinking I shouldn’t have. I don’t have a deer problem but a raccoon problem!!!

  11. Our main problem is voles going for the roots. Our soil is lovely and soft, so voles get around everywhere. I am looking into borrowing stuff to use as a DIY rodenator to blow them up, but I was wondering if anyone has dipped the roots of bareroot fruit trees into bone sauce against voles?

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