Love/Hate Relationship

I have a love/hate relationship with Google. What do I love about it? The name for starters. It's fun and funky. I also love the search feature. It's one of the easiest to use. I've used others and I always go back to Google. I just like the way they compile their results.

Now, what do I hate? The invasiveness. I hate their tracking every inquiry. I particularly hate them asking me for a cell phone number just in case I forget my password. Guess what Google? I don't live on my cell phone like some folks do. In fact I generally turn it on only when I have to make an outgoing call. If I lost my password to my bloggy account my cell phone number is probably one of the slowest ways to contact me. I also know why you want that number. You want to be able to sell it to folks who want to send advertising to my cell. I use a pay as you go phone, so I really don't want you to use up all my minutes with your crappy ads, so again, no. You may not have my cell phone number.

I also have a gmail account. I find it clunky and not very user friendly. You really should copy the features of Outlook more closely. I suspect that's one of the most used email configurations out there. It has a ton of features and is very intuitive. On the rare occasions when I do open up my Google mail account I get so frustrated that I just close it without really using it. When you can't find the "send" button on your email then there is something seriously wrong.

I doubt Google much cares about me and my preferences, but it is good to voice these complaints. Doing it on Google Blogger makes it that much more fun!

The Deer Deterrent

We live in the country. We have deer. Lots of deer. We have entire deer families who come out and gambol across the lawn, and generally wreak havoc nibbling on our plants and trees. Pretty though they may be it's very annoying to have the last lovely bloom of your favorite plant plucked right off its stem by some pesky Bambi. For years we have tolerated this.

Finally I thought "enough's enough". So when the deer started in on MY DAYLILIES I decided it was high time to fight back. I took to the internets to try to find a cure and find it I did. I made up a batch of this thoroughly nasty mixture and splashed it on the plants. Then I made another batch and added some cayenne and chili powder to it for good measure. The end result? The end of the season plants are intact. The deer don't even come close to that flower bed any longer. Success!

Here's the evidence. You can see the stems where the deer started to nibble on the leaves of the Hostas.

After a couple of applications of the deer deterrent the Hostas started to leaf out again. Finally they bloomed with these big showy flowers.

This is a close up of one of the flowers. Its scent is reminiscent of honeysuckle. I have taken extra special pleasure from them this year since I had to fight for them.

The Secret Sauce:

1 TB milk or yogurt

1 egg

2 - 3 cloves of garlic, smashed OR 1 TB powdered garlic.(Warning: do NOT use garlic salt. You'll kill your plants. Only use garlic powder.)

1 TB chili and/or cayenne powder

Mix ingredients and dilute in gallon jug. If you used garlic cloves you'll need to just shake the mixture over the plants. If you used garlic powder you can probably get the mixture to go through a spray bottle. Apply to plants. Let dry (it's pretty stinky stuff). Since I was covering a small area I only used about 1/2 of the gallon jug. I applied the rest of the mixture a day or so later. The instructions I found on the internet said to reapply after a rain. I have not done that. The deer have stayed away since I put this stuff on the plants in July. I don't know if it's the stinky egg and garlic or the chili powder burn but they sure don't like it. Maybe next year I'll get to enjoy my daylilies a few weeks longer.

Good luck. I hope it works as well for you as it did for me.