Thursday in the Garden

Kitties, it is a long time since I did a gardening post!    As you may know, our garden has a lot of trees which make a lot of shade, so flowers do not do well in our garden.  And also - THE DEER.

Well, to overcome that issue, almost every spring, Dad plants impatiens in window boxes and also some in round pots, which are kept on the deck - there they get enough sun and shade to do quite well, and the deer don't get to them.      Also he grows some parsley (for the caterpillars) and a couple of herbs such as basil and mint.  

Cutting a long story shorter, when it came time to work on re-staining our deck (which is big and two levels), he cleared everything off the deck to clean it and prep it for staining.   The impatiens window boxes were at the end of the driveway, and the herbs were outside the garage door, and in the evenings, he would bring all the plants into the garage.   The poor car had to sit out even!

But ONE NIGHT HE FORGOT.    We already knew that deer like impatiens:   note that the BACK window box is untouched but the front one and right side of the middle one are pretty gobbled.   We imagine it was maybe the baby deers, since we think Mama would have eaten even more.

And there's hardly anything left in this round pot that was flourishing with impatiens all over.

We thought the other plants had been left alone by the garage but further inspection showed they had even tasted the Christmas Cactus plants (not visible here) and did a bit more than tasting the basil.

Here is a closeup of the basil:  see where they nipped it right off?

Since then Dad had been very careful to bring in the plants at night, and he has transplanted some better impatiens into the box where they nibbled just at one end.   The deck staining is finished, and very soon, all those plants should be back on it.  

I want to thank and acknowledge Jonesie for hosting Thursdays in the Garden, even though I don't post about our garden very often.