Roses Can be Compared to a Hershey's Chocolate Bar for a Deer

Oh, deer, oh, deer. Am I setting myself up for lots of frustration? After I published last week's blog post, I thought I'd better check on Google about what deer like to eat from our gardens and discovered that one of their favorites is roses. I am very reluctant to give up on my plan to have a rose garden but I don't want to get into a heated battle with the deer who live in my neighborhood. Plus, they like to eat when I'm fast asleep. Noshing all night long in all the gardens in my neighborhood.

Google tells me that deer can be dissuaded from chomping on your roses if you plant something around the roses that smells distasteful to deer. One plant that deer don't like the smell of is lavender. I love lavender plants. So, that's my updated and new plan - a rose garden completely surrounded by lavender.

This is where I'm at now. The vegetable garden has been tilled and divested of all vegetable seeds but, unfortunately, not of weed seeds. My take on this is: when you till a garden, you're actually planting weeds. Turning over that soil and burying weeds seeds deep down in the bed, only to have them flourish again in a couple weeks. So this is what the bed looks like now. You can see where I have made one section for roses. And a center circle where a beautiful birdbath will be situated. The garden will have one of these sections in each of the four corners. From the center circle will be four cedar chip paths - dividing each of the four sections. A "birds eye view" will look like a cross.

The reason my new section in the foreground doesn't have weeds is because I made it a "newspaper" or "lasagna" garden. You ask: what is a "newspaper" or "lasagna" garden? I got you a little YouTube video to explain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCyum7tPMP0

I have made many "newspaper" gardens. They are the "bomb".

I am moving top soil, that I had dumped in my driveway, to my backyard, by wheelbarrow and dumping the wheelbarrow full of topsoil plus cow manure that I mixed in, onto the thick layer of newspaper that I layed down over the weeds to smother them and turn them into compost. That is the "newspaper" method. It's a "little bit by little bit" process.

I may be able to plant roses and lavender in the fall. If not, then next spring.

Here's a couple more things that are going on in my garden. Bees buzzing around the purple cone flowers. There's one in mid air on the top left and a great big bumble bee on the head of the big flower in the foreground.

And on the patio, in a pot, supposedly a grape tomato (doesn't look like one). This green tomato has been hanging around for about a month. I wonder if it's ever gonna to turn red. Perhaps I need to make "fried green tomatoes".