Mike----When I lived in Fl I always had that problem. What I did to slow things down was stop feeding them the middle of Oct. Water the crap out of them Nov & Dec. Usually by Jan I had a lot of blind growth with just a few blooms on all the bushs. Didn't bother me to prune & strip all my bushs come Feb. One year I didn't prune or strip my bushs and they looked ugly and the blooms were pathetic all year. I never did that again. Now when I pruned, I NEVER pruned hard. Just cleaned and shaped the bushs. Even the ones I had on Dr. Huey responded very well.

Yeah it does get tiresome having to deal with the millions of babies that return....*like a carpet* Like Karen, I haven't purposely planted out any seedlings since 2005 and 4 years later I'm still dealing with the seed bank. I have been allowing a manageable few to grow here and there since then also, but I get them out before seed sets....it's just too ridiculous. Amaranthus 'Intense Purple' is next to be a goner. I hate to eliminate something so pretty but my ol' back can't hack it anymore!! Besides I'd rather enjoy my garden more than hump my *ss off keeping up with these 2 thugs :) Vera

I still love the deer, they are so beautiful, especially the babies. We put up a deer fence along the woods and now they leave me alone. It is heartbreaking to go out and find your hostas mowed down, been there. Sometimes they are so smart, they come in through our driveway. What I did notice is they only bothered the old solid green junk hostas. Couldn't figure out why, then I thought maybe because all of my good hostas and roses get the Bayer 2 in 1 applied every 6 weeks or so. Maybe something in that makes them taste bad.

June, yes it's so cute. But I hope you haven't tried to touch or pet it? There is a disease that wild rabbits carry called "rabbit fever", Tularemia - you don't want to get that. As long as you don't touch it or handle anything that it touches you're fine so don't freak out completely but if you look up that disease you'll learn more about it. If it gets into the lungs it can actually kill you. There are several different ways that the disease can attack, so I think the pneumonia one is the worst and most dangerous. I suspect that I got it from handling a wounded baby rabbit a few years back. I woke up about 3 nights later and I was having a hard time breathing, very rapid and shallow, to the point where I couldn't even get up, I had a fever and bad headache and I was shivering so hard and strong that my whole body hurt. I actually thought that I was about to die but I couldn't even get the strength to get up and do anything, finally I guess I passed out and when I woke up everything was back to normal again. It was very scary. I found out about rabbit fever from a neighbor who said a friend of hers wound up in the emergency room with it - same thing - she was handling a wounded baby.