Hi lovetogrowflowers. I don't think you are bothering anyone. Lucy is right, try not to stress yourself out. Take deep breaths. LOL. I think your plan for the two potted ones are perfect. I read in one of your earlier post asking about if the crawl space was ok and someone I believe said yes. For me, I WOULD strip the leaves first. The brug will be trying to take care of the leaves instead of useing its energy to go dormant. Plus you wouldn't want bugs to sneak in on a leaf and spend the winter eating your brug. :( As for the one in ground...well people cut back or don't cut back for different reasons. One of the biggest I think is for safety and the health of the plant. During the winter the brug branches will freeze so they cut them back so there is less of a chance this will happen. Who wants a mushy rotting brug in spring? How tall is the brug you still have in the ground? How close to the ground is the Y? The experts can chime in if this is a bad idea, but how about if you...1.Stip the leaves. 2.Cut off only the top green tips. (Save them) 3.Mulch as high as you can get it, at least to the Y if it's close to the ground. 4.Cover the brug with a REALY big rubber trash can or tub. 5.Maybe even cover that with an old blanket. Or would that be over kill? The cuttings you could take in and root them. Hopefully none of that was bad advice. Me and Lonny are newbies too. This will be our 2nt winter. We killed one of the two brugs we had last winter. But that was because we brought them in and tried to keep them growing. This year we brought all in again. This winter we have many more, plus young ones. We made a Brug room and have been learning lots. So we are going to give it a try. If they had been bigger, we would have left them out in ground to go dormant. Now that I have writen a novel.(sorry, long winded) Try not to worry, you brought them back to health and they are doing well enough to be around to overwinter, so I think you are doing well. Kim

Suebot - don't think i'm going to tell you anything that somebody else hasn't said, but since i've had too much experience with deer & rabbits, i figured i'd concur with the remedies that worked for me. i used to live/learned to garden on nantucket and martha's vineyard, where the deer are at least as unreasonably tame and probably more abundant than they are in ct. i've heard stories of people standing 10 ft away from them yelling at them while they chomp on their hydrangea flower buds. one woman i was talking to claimed she saw the deer attacking her dalmation!! anyway, my first thought about your original message was are you sure all damage is due to deer and not rabbits? - when they stand on their hind legs, they can eat quite high - on a couple of my client's properties on the islands, i had more problems with bunnies than deer, especially with my daylilies & echinacea. so, i also found success with the deer away spray products; i can't remember which one i used, but i believe it had garlic & mint in it and i actually liked the way it smelled. the directions said to spray every couple of weeks (??), but i found that i had to spray every couple of days or so & definitely after a rain. it was pretty time consuming. unfortunately, my other success was fencing in the gardens. i just tried to be decorative about it - i used nice cedar posts with caps, bird netting @ 4' high (you can't really see it, so the garden still looks nice), i hung rope along the top of the netting (for a nautical look...). I did throw netting on top of the gardens in the spring until things grew too tall, but i have to admit, the deer hopped in a couple of times (- that would've been a mess i kind of would have liked to see). i now live in maine and have a large cutting garden in my back yard, a good distance from my house and i use the bird netting as the fencing (simply because it was the only fencing i could find that would be high enough in one piece) and it works (doesn't handle snow load, though). i see deer in the back and they walk right around the garden. chipmunks are now my problem. unfortunately, my true feeling is that if the deer want to get to something, they will. sorry to be so lengthy, good luck. just out of curiosity, do you have phlox and is it being eaten - that always gets destroyed the worst for me. -mara

The one thing to check, I think, is if the GC was trying to warn you off. Does he really want to work over the holidays? Do his subs? Are they taking their kids on vacation just when you thought they'd be working? The GC might want the job too much to tell you no-can-do, and figure he can probably make it work out, rather than being eager for your start date. If you're sure he and the subs are on board, go for it! And maybe add an incentive bonus for them to be done, cleaned up and signed off by January 25 (sooner if that's the quote), which gives you a week to get your act together before your party. Plus a penalty if it's not done by February 1. It can be done if everyone's on board. I only worry that less than 2 months over the holidays is awfully tight, if you really want them done in time for the party.

I have not scheduled surgery yet and am ignoring the suggestion of having them both done at once. When I was a newly graduated RN I worked ortho for a year ( some disasters but hips have come along way) and my mom had a horrible hip replacement outcome, so I am putting it off for as long as I can. Don't wait so long you are too out of shape ... it's best done while you are still reasonably spry with muscle strength left for rehab instead of totally crippled and weak. And before you have wrecked the surrounding support muscles and tendons compensating for the pain and lack of mobility. (SO has a prosthetic knee, his brother has 2 of them, and another brother has a hip replacement he loves). Yes, it's come a LONG ways, even using 3-d imaging and custom manufacture of the prosthetics if needed. They can build a copy of the joint, figure out exactly how things need to be altered and dry-fit the prosthesis without ever lifting a scalpel.