No time for a long post with Italy photos today. So I decided to show you some of the stuff that’s going on around the homestead.

I was really glad to get home. I missed playing in my garden. But I am rethinking the size of some of my beds. When I got home, this is representative of what my beds looked like:

And this is one of the clean ones! We must have had a hell of a winter while we were gone. There are several perennials that just didn’t come back. And not ones that I planted the year before. I accept about a 50% loss on newly planted perennials. I am learning by trial and error what the deer like to eat and what can accept shady conditions. ‘Cause my yard doesn’t get a whole lot of light.

But I lost perennials that were several years old! My dianthus is gone, several of my Siberian Iri didn’t come out this year, coral bells, cottage pinks… Gone.

On the flip side, some annuals that I haven’t planted in years have started showing up… Pansies in the front bed (none there for 18 months), snapdragons in rock beds (I haven’t had snapdragons for at least two years). I have echinacea that shows up EVERYWHERE. I have two in my front bed and they are active suckers. I dig probably 10-15 babies out of the yard every year!

But I digress.

I got everything all weeded in the back and put in some pretty flowers on the 4th of July. We had friends over and I couldn’t handle sitting out back looking at the weeds:

In addition to all of the flowers in the ground, I planted some planters and had them on the edge of the deck to add some color.

This is what I woke up to on July 6th:

Those were begonias. (See my shadow on the bottom!! Cool.)

This is what I call the buffet:

Those used to be petunias.

What really burns me about this though is that the only petunias they ate were the ones on the patio. They left the ones in the beds alone. What is it with these deer? Are they now too lazy to bend their necks and eat the ones on the ground? Is this what I’ve led these deer to?