Suebot - don't think i'm going to tell you anything that somebody else hasn't said, but since i've had too much experience with deer & rabbits, i figured i'd concur with the remedies that worked for me. i used to live/learned to garden on nantucket and martha's vineyard, where the deer are at least as unreasonably tame and probably more abundant than they are in ct. i've heard stories of people standing 10 ft away from them yelling at them while they chomp on their hydrangea flower buds. one woman i was talking to claimed she saw the deer attacking her dalmation!! anyway, my first thought about your original message was are you sure all damage is due to deer and not rabbits? - when they stand on their hind legs, they can eat quite high - on a couple of my client's properties on the islands, i had more problems with bunnies than deer, especially with my daylilies & echinacea. so, i also found success with the deer away spray products; i can't remember which one i used, but i believe it had garlic & mint in it and i actually liked the way it smelled. the directions said to spray every couple of weeks (??), but i found that i had to spray every couple of days or so & definitely after a rain. it was pretty time consuming. unfortunately, my other success was fencing in the gardens. i just tried to be decorative about it - i used nice cedar posts with caps, bird netting @ 4' high (you can't really see it, so the garden still looks nice), i hung rope along the top of the netting (for a nautical look...). I did throw netting on top of the gardens in the spring until things grew too tall, but i have to admit, the deer hopped in a couple of times (- that would've been a mess i kind of would have liked to see). i now live in maine and have a large cutting garden in my back yard, a good distance from my house and i use the bird netting as the fencing (simply because it was the only fencing i could find that would be high enough in one piece) and it works (doesn't handle snow load, though). i see deer in the back and they walk right around the garden. chipmunks are now my problem. unfortunately, my true feeling is that if the deer want to get to something, they will. sorry to be so lengthy, good luck. just out of curiosity, do you have phlox and is it being eaten - that always gets destroyed the worst for me. -mara

I can't help with induction, since I've never used it, but I can comment on woks because I do quite a bit of stir-frying. I used to swear by my Farberware non-stick wok, but after getting a BlueStar gas rangetop in my new kitchen, I decided I'd try a "real" Chinese wok, and got a carbon steel one on eBay. To my delight, after seasoning it, I discovered that it really is non-stick (well, occasionally, a bit does stick here and there, but it's rare). I can heat to a far higher temperature than I'd want to heat the non-stick version, and it cleans up easily with hot water and just a dab of detergent. Carbon steel is magnetic, and a flat-bottomed wok would sit on the cooktop surface, so that would work with induction, but would more than just the bottom of the wok get hot? With my BlueStar, I remove the burner grate and the wok sits down in the flames so both the bottom and the sides get heated. The induction units designed for stir-frying that I've seen are bowl-shaped to accomodate a wok, so I've just assumed that's what one needed, but I don't know. ---Margaret

Are you sure it's a hydrangea or are you asking if it is?Well if you know it's a hydrangea, that's a start, lol. Otherwise, it's just some sticks and you'll have to wait for it to pop to get an idea what it is. If it's a hydrangea..Wait till it warms up a lil and new growth will start coming from the ground, it looks like it might be already, pic isn't too clear but I think I see some green down there.. After it is warmed up a bit more, say the end of April, you can prune those branches down if you don't see any new growth from them as well, if you see green coming from the branches, you can leave it or prune it, up to you. Hope I helped..maybe someone else will give their opinion.

Misting succulents every week as a general advice is not very helpful -:( - not your fault but store employee. It needs to be in container with drainage holes (I can't tell if yours has them or not). It should be potted in fast draining mix - what I see looks like peat with very little perlite in it. Simple and better mix you can make is 50/50 mix of Cactus & Succulent soil and sifted/rinsed perlite. It should be watered when potting mix is almost completely dry - use bamboo skewer or chopstick to check it. It needs as much light as possible but should be acclimatized to it if it was in darker spot. This is what just about all succulents need.