Hey, Gabz. Hope you had a better week this time. Ours has been better too. I spray very few bugs - the sawfly larvae with insecticidal soap and the peach tree scale with horticultural oil. Otherwise it’s pretty much strip them off, squish or stomp.
The deer now - I would spray them in a jiffy. My homemade repellent keeps clogging my sprayer even when I leave the eggs out. But the idea of paying something like $14 a quart for a bottle at Home Depot that has less than 1% capascin (cayenne), mint oil and rotten egg solids - forget it. I’m thinking of extracting the cayenne in oil, and mixing that, mint oil and a little detergent with Wilt-Pruf so it won’t wash off in the rain.
Everything is beautiful now but I’m still in a gripy mood. You read about getting rid of your lawn to save time and energy. Replace it with groundcover and shrubs. Well, I did that where the grass wasn’t growing too well, and now I’m trying to weed out several thousand maple, crabapple, multiflora rose and poison ivy seedlings out of my groundcover. In theory once the pachysandra and the hellebore get thick enough, they’ll shade out the seedlings. But the deer eat pachysandra, yes they do, and the hellebore are young little things needing help.
I am going to go out now and smell the lilacs, and look at the Virginia bluebells, the hosta, the bleeding heart, the delicate Green Pearl and Hawera narcissus and the new leaves pushing up, and enjoy the freshness and life of it all.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.
Good for you!!!! And I love Robert Frost's work!