Where we are up North ---

slugs and snails
crickets
grasshoppers
voles
DEER
rabbits

I've had whole plants disappear in one day up there. It feels like the whole world against me sometimes!
So I have decided on container gardening. This is working much better.
(so far).

Also I found a tip on the net which I am also going to try...
Shavings of Irish Spring soap, to protect plants from being eaten.
Sprinkled around the base of things you want to protect. They dissolve in
about a month or 2 depending on rain fall amount.

I bought the Deer Fortress, and will try those too.

If Deer and Rabbits are hungry, they are going to eat the plants. The Soap, hair, home remedies are not going to work for very long. Even putting wire over the plants. They eventually eat what they want and move along.

I posted a link earlier in the thread for Deer Resistant plant material and you may want to try to put some of those around the perimeter of your yard.

The biggest problem is humans invading the deer habitat. Put out a salt lick for them and hope they stick to that and move on to greener pastures and co-habit with you.

I live in an area with deer, elk, foxes, and antelope. The foxes eat the gophers but not in a large enough quantity so unfortunately I lose a lot of my trees in the nursery. I have to call the county pest control squad to come out and poison them. The upside is that their predators don't eat the stomachs so they are not harmed. The deer nibble on the trees but they also eat the grass that I plant to hold in the moisture so I don't have to water as often. It's a trade off.

Let me know how the deer fortress works. I've not seen one at work.

because I put out salt and food for the new mothers and fawns.

Then they hang around and after they get used to our presence, they move to the shore and eat my small garden (mostly containers).

The rabbits do not get up to the high containers, but the deer really
don't mind. I used a sonic device in the past, but last year the deer learned to
ignore it.

I only need to have 2mons of deterrent, not a whole year. So I am hoping the deer don't like the Fortress.

Last year was the most aggressive damage..I move my containers up on the unused dock at night and they are typically safe then. Last year she ate them ALL.

Our island does not have alot of soil base, so plant material is sparse.
We spend quite a bit of $$ feeding the deer (and now the rabbits).
Our cat keeps the rabbits in check however.
Here is a picture of a hare eating a soy chip...that season, we had a drought, so all the greenery for the rabbits was very low. It is unheard of to see them like this in the day, semi tame. So they were starving.

The second pic is a typical deer visit (this one 2004)
That is their feeding rock and the salt lick behind them.

The deer do swim on and off to us. We see them do this. But the rabbits cannot. They can only move
from island to island during winter when the water freezes.
It has been decades of not seeing a single rabbit... and now we have tons of them! ????

These deer will eat anything. The only thing spared for me last season was chives.
"Deer resistant plants" has no meaning where we are.

When we return in Sept, I'll report back on the effectiveness of the soap shavings and
Deer Fortress. The Fortress just came UPS yesterday thru Amazon. (they had the lowest price,
beating even Ebay).

We have enormous amounts of damage from deer and TURTLES .
I put wire "cages" around my tomato plants that stop most of the deer and rabbits but don't even slow the turtles. Of course they get only the lowest fruit and the birds get the higher ones.

We have a salt block that the deer love, far down on the other side of the house (near the hostas), but it doesn't slow them down.

First let me say thank you for this section of the forum!

Next, I have a question about peonies. We moved into a new house last fall that has some of everything in the yard. This little lady kept her yard with a variety of what looks like a gardening catalog.

There are several areas that have different colors of peonies and what I wanted to know is if I snip the blooms off, will they bloom more for the season? Or do they just have their own course of things? I have never had them before.

Thanks

as far as I know.

The ants on them is normal.
If you want to cut and bring them in, turn them upside down in a
container of water, and the ants will go away (do this outside of course).

Peonies only bloom once each season. It's best to cut off the dead bloom stalks once they have bloomed in order to allow the plant to maximize it's food production for next year to the bulb from just the leaves and not the flower stalks.

Here's a good link for information about Peonies. I have several Peonies in my garden and just love them. I will be dividing mine this fall as they have gotten quite large!

http://www.flower-gardening-made-easy.com/peonies.html

I am glad you like this part of the forum. Brain and decided to do it as she is very good with tips about some things and since I have a landscape design business that I started after I graduated with my Bachelors Degree in Horticulture we put our collective heads together to help answer questions!

This is fun to do and I really enjoy answering the questions posed by our community! Thanks everyone!

I think Peonies are a major bummer and risk to dig up and divide.

I seriously injured my back doing that many years ago (the only time I hurt myself) so I'll never touch them again! They can go down a foot or more!
Please be careful! They are lovely though!

After witnessing deer/rabbits eating my hosta garden to nubs, I found an organic repellent solution at a local retail hardware store that worked wonders in training the critters to stay away. Here is a link to the product should anyone be interested in locating it:

http://terradisiac.com/products.php?...penparent=2213

I too, only had to use the product for two months, and the application of this product is easy.

Several years ago, I purchased my mom a Lilac Bush...it's her favorite flowering anything....


Problem...
It bloomed twice.... never grew more than 3 ft tall and parts of it keep dying off every year. New sprouts come up every year but then die off before some is gone. It hasn't grown enough to bloom for the past 2 years.


Any ideas?? Or should I just try to find her a new one and write-off the one she has as a lost cause???



Abbie