This week my blog posting schedule has been disrupted due to “first world” problems fretting about my master bath remodeling. We still have not started on the actual remodeling yet but the planning has taken me a long time to finalize. Fortunately, the planning is almost finished and soon I hope to be able to sit back and let my wonderful contractor take over and do all the work!

In the meantime, I am trying to continue to make progress on my gardening efforts and I have a few small updates to share with you. The first one is a very simple update to my prior post about strategies to make your garden deer-resistant.

In my prior post, I focused on things that are kind of tough for most of us to achieve because they are either expensive or time consuming solutions: fencing, deer repellants and choosing landscape plants that deer won’t eat.

This year, my neighbor inadvertently came up with a brilliant idea about deer management.

We were out in my front yard discussing both the sorry state of my garden and the fact that my azalea bush was in full, gorgeous bloom. I asked my neighbor if the timing of her azalea blooms had been affected this year by the warmer than usual weather.

“My azaleas never bloom. The deer always eat them.” She replied.

I told her that our azaleas never used to bloom either and we had pretty much given up on them until we forgot to prune them these past two years and we have had more blooms that we ever remember!

“That’s because your azalea is so tall the deer can’t reach it.” she advised. “See, it looks like they ate everything below which is why you have no blooms there.”

A simple idea was born . . .

If you don’t want deer to eat your plants, grow things that are taller than the deer!

It was one of those moments of pure simplicity and outside the box thinking.

I am not quite sure how to take full advantage of this idea yet but thinking about growing vertically to avoid deer problems is an intriguing concept. For now, I will just resort to thinking differently about my “overgrown” azaleas.

Have you had any simplicity inspirations lately? Please share in the comments.