love these plants, but the Deer love them too!
07/10/2018 By Adam Chornesky

I have clay soil, and to make it worse, I have shade trees with large gnarly roots. The ground under the trees gets extremely dry for two reasons, I think. First, the leaves block the rainfall so much less water gets to the ground. Also, the large tree roots pull in all the moisture from the ground. Additionally, the tree roots make the soil shallow. Less ground for plants to root in. I have started using a pickax to loosen up the ground. I find that breaking up the soil is not so good because the water runoff carries the soil with it. Instead, I pry up the soil with the flat end of the pickax. This leaves a void under the soil for water to collect in. When I plant the periwinkle, I pour water into the hole before I plant them. I am using buckets of water to keep the plants moist until we can get some rainfall. As I said, the deer love all flowering plants, so I have recently started to put twigs and wood chips around the plants to fool the deer. Hopefully this will work.