My very best gardening tips EVER!!!!

I had to share this now or I'd forget. We've having guests for dinner and I went to cut some lavender for the table and some for her. Then I realized that I'd never shared my best gardening tip if you have deer.

At this time of year on a hot day you can smell my garden 1/4 mile away. I grew and sold old-fashioned roses from cuttings at my nursery.. The problem with planting small rose plants (or any rose) is that the deer pull them right out of the ground or the gohpers munch them from below . Well somewhere I read that if you plant 3 lavender plants around a rose the deer (or gophers) will not bother it. It works. Once the rose gets really large the deer will eat on it but the rose can handle it then...

Over the years some roses have frozen out or just died but the trios of lavender continues to thrive. So now I have 100s of clumps of lavender throughout the old part of the garden. I always planted the same variety... Hidcote, the hardiest and the darkest purple of them all.

Now to keep lavender nice looking and getting scraggly, it has to be sheared back every year...not by me with all I have. So my next biggest tip..."OLD LADIES' I have church groups who send old ladies out to collect lavender. They dry it and sell it at their Xmas bazaars. They shear lavender away from the house and it's a good deed!!!! I can't define it but surely this falls into the realm of recyling!!