I am probably jinxing myself, but I don't get a lot of deer damage. I am literally three blocks from the county park and I get hoofprints all the time but not too much nibbling. In the spring my phlox gets a free pruning and my centurea montana (bachelor's button) gets eaten down to the ground (that might be rabbits), but once I start spraying with Deer Solution I don't seem to have much of an issue fortunately. It helps that my echinacea is planted right under a low hanging birch tree - the deer get a face full of branches and move on I suspect. Other parts of my town I have literally seen 10 or more deer just standing around on people's lawn, thank goodness that isn't me.

I've heard that Nasturtium will repel them/keep them out of the garden when they come close to it. I've never heard that it would keep them away all together (scare them, etc). May be worth some research... I often surround my garden with Nasturtium, as they climb fences and trellises (very beautiful). Some say they fight off soil nematode too while attracting bees, which is great if you want to grow some nice cucumbers or tomatoes in there too:-) Hope this helps, Stella

Let the remaining stem and leaves go dormant just like the rest of you lilies and they will be just fine for next year. In fact, they will be larger and have more flowers than the others--all because they didn't flower this year. Flowering is very stressfull and these now will be able to put all their energy into making a larger bulb for next year.

Ilene, You can harvest your onions whenever you want. The only advantage I know in leaving them in the ground until their neck softens and falls over is that they dry and cure a little better. Pretty much every garden I routinely drive past around here is now "onion-free", so if we all have harvested, y'all shouldn't be too far behind. I have noticed that in excessively rainy and cloudy years, the onions are slower to mature. The farm house on 14 acres sounds just perfect to me because that is what we have....a Victorian-style farmhouse (not decorated Victorian style inside) on 14.5 acres, partially wooded. LOL Of course, we bought raw land and had to build the house, but I knew I wanted an old-fashioned country-style house, not a city-style house out in the country. Keep us posted on what you think of it after visiting it. My purple daturas have been opening up very late at night, so I don't get to enjoy the flowers until the next morning. They don't usually do that, and I don't know what is wrong with them, unless it is the heat. Yellow leaves turning to brown on the bottom of the tomato plants is somewhat related to weather. It sounds like Early Blight, which is my biggest problem, although it is worse some years than others and worse on some varieties than others. I'll link some Early Blight info below. My hollyhocks are still going strong too and I am enjoying them a great deal. They do seem to be lasting longer this year and it is such a treat! Usually by now either the heat, bugs or hollyhock rust have gotten to them, but they seem quite happy and look really good. I'd say it is the weather, but you and I have vastly different weather--one very wet and one very dry--so we'll just have to chalk it up to luck. It is just amazing to me that the lettuce is still edible in late June--that's rare! My corn is silking. Now, if I can just get good pollination, protect it from the corn earworms and keep the racoons out of it! I planted it about 6 weeks later than usual due to the cold nights and don't have very high expectations. I'll try again with fall corn, whether the spring corn does well or not. The deer-nibbled okra and peppers are rebounding with new foliage, and both are setting blooms, so maybe we'll have some okra before long and some peppers eventually. It is TOO hot and my garden is suffering.....not from the heat, but from a lack of attention! I did pick beans and tomatoes this morning, and did a very small amount of weeding. I need to get out there early tomorrow and do a good weeding job. It isn't that there's a lot of weeds, because there aren't. But, there are some mostly grassy weeds, and I like to keep them out (because they get out of control so quickly) of the beds, so "any" at all is "too many" to me. In this heat, my gardening time is roughly between 6 and 9 a.m. and then after about 7 p.m. I do stay out longer, though, when I am mowing. Mick, I grow sunflowers (different varieties) from early spring to late fall. My early spring ones are finished and I already yanked them out and my summer ones are about 18" tall. In July, I'll plant another round for fall. I LOVE sunflowers. We grow birdseed sunflowers in the "dog yard" to provide the dogs with extra shade. It works pretty well....the sunflowers shade about 40% of the yard. Right now, the birdseed sunflowers are about 8 to 9 feet tall, and very thick.....these are branching sunflowers and the branches go out 2 to 4 feet. First the plants bloom on top, which they are doing right now. Then, later on they bloom on all the branches. In the dog yard, they reseed themselves and have for 5 or 6 years now. For this particular situation, the birdseed sunflowers are ideal because the flowers are small and, therefore, the plants do not get topheavy and fall over. We tried two other kinds of sunflowers with large seedheads, Mammoth Russian and Burpee SunForest Mix and with both of those, a strong wind in a thunderstorm knocked them all down, so the dogs didn't have as much shade those years. If you have watermelons forming, you should have ripe fruit by late summer, and even sooner if you grew small watermelons. Keep your fingers crossed that the rain slows down because too much rain leaves you watermelons with poor flavor. Scott, Now, firecrackers are something we might try. I know deer have to be hunted to keep the population down, and we have let locals hunt in our woods before, but I just don't like it. This little herd of deer was here before we were. They have their trails, and their watering holes (native springs in the woods) and their areas where they bed down at night, and it doesn't seem right to kill them just because we moved onto land that was their home too. I'm just a big softy and I can't help it. We like the deer. We feed them. I just wish I could keep them from eating the veggies. Nothing is cuter than seeing them bring a fawn (last year one had twins!) up to the house to show it off. And, the deer are pretty smart. Sometimes they come up to the house and look in the windows. LOL I guess I wouldn't think it was cute if they were breaking into the house the way bears sometimes do. Raccoons are another problem animal here. They make it almost impossible to get a corn crop. They come right up on the porch and knock on the windows, begging for food. We DON'T feed them, and we don't leave cat or dog food out because it attracts them. We also have to keep our chicks and keats locked up tight until they are almost full-grown. We used to keep the babies in a brooder with a hardware cloth floor (1/4" mesh) until the raccoons got into the coop, reaching up through that mesh and pulled off all the baby chicks' and guineas' legs. Now we keep the babies locked up with all the coop doors closed all the time until they are pretty much full-grown. I won't even send a dog after a coon 'cause those coons are mean. Cute, but mean. We trap and relocate them, but there's always a billion more. One of our neighbors trapped 18 last year (and I think he shoots them after he traps them) and the remaining ones STILL got all of his corn. Last year one of our neighbors (the one who lives directly between us and the Red River, so he has much worse wildlife problems) allowed a young man to bow-hunt on his land. This is an accomplished hunter. He was out there night after night and never got a deer. Not a one. I guess they know how to hide when they need to. This particular neighbor has copperheads by the dozens! He tells me he sits on his porch on the weekends (he lives in Dallas during the week) and just shoots and shoots and shoots them. Now, if we had that many poisonous snakes, I'd be out on the porch with a gun also. Dawn