Garden Giveaway Winners

We have our Garden Giveaway contest winners! Email addresses of our 3 winners have been pulled from our usual Mexican basket-hat by He Who Hogs The Power Tools, and the lucky ones have been notified of their great fortune:

Thanks to Comtech, a CatStop goes to JCF (who apparently has a very specific pesky stray cat in mind for discouragement), a SquirrelStop to Queen Marlene (her songbirds will be happy!), and a SlugsAway goes to Peggie (they say everything is bigger in Texas, so I don’t want to see her slugs!).

Thanks for playing! Your prizes will go out in the mail this week, so cross your fingers for prompt and efficient postal service… And for others, less fortunate, who must now weep over their pest-ravaged gardens in disappointment: Better luck next time! And there will be a next time, you know it!


Original post 27 May 208
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Save Your Berries From the Hungry Birds

While our friends Down Under are basking in gardening season, we in the Frozen North can’t see our gardens for snowdrifts… ah, but that never stopped a keen gardener from planning ahead for a new season’s harvest!

Me, I’m dreaming of sweet strawberries, fat gooseberries, tart white currants, raspberries bursting sweet on my tongue, blueberries hanging in dusty indigo clusters…

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The Desperate Gardener and the Homemade Deer Repellent

Asiatic lilies in mixed bouquetI can live with the adorable little deer eating my apple trees. Well, I can tolerate it because there’s not any practical way to protect the orchard, short of a ten-foot-high electric fence (not practical) — but when it comes to the flower garden, the deer had better keep off!

My pride and joy (and the result of a heck of a lot of digging and weeding) is a 40-foot mixed perennial garden bed. The deer seem to feel that this lovely garden is a buffet table, laid out for their browsing pleasure.

Asiatic lilies don’t stand a chance. Every year I get all excited to see my gorgeous exotic lilies budding up, and then comes a night when the deer tiptoe in and work their systematic way down the length of the border, eating off the top half of every single lily.

This year, even the delphineum plants have been thoroughly browsed, and the heuchera, and the lavatera. The deer have even been eating my daylilies, and I just gave up on growing hosta plants some years ago… It wouldn’t surprise me to go out some morning and find the prickly Scottish thistles eaten down to the ground.

It would break a gardener’s heart.

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