Steve - I understand perfectly about toting the mulch around. When I got that 13 CY of mulch delivered, it took me months to move it from the driveway into the back yard, one tote at a time! Pain in the BUTT.. dirty work, bleh! But I noticed that I didn't lose half as many roses w/the mulch as I normally do. that's why I'm crossing fingers, toes, & eyeballs w/the roses I got from RU this past time. They're sooooooooooo teeny compared to a grafted rose. I ended up using yard flags (the flags that like the electric company uses the show where there's lines in the ground so you don't cut into them) to mark the roses that I 100% buried. I found that burying them 100% doesn't hurt them in the winter, so I did that with English Perfume w/the bottomless bucket around it to hold the mulch in place and the rest I just heaped the mulch into a humungo pile. My weather's been odd.. the night time temps have been in the low 30s to upper 20s and daytimes have been almost 60 w/no snow in sight. Again. The beginning of the month looked SOOOOOOOO promising, but the snow's been caught up in the mountains (they had one hell of a blizzard this past weekend) and nothing but desiccating winds down here (again). Saturday morning looks like I'll be spending it watering due to lack of snowfall. I'm sorely tempted to buy a couple of roses from Vintage I couldn't get from Cliff's sell-off, and I'll be growing them inside the house until May when I can plop 'em into the ground.
What about a dog for the deer? I've found that they're not too trainable.
They're really pretty, but pretty stupid, too. But they *are* tasty!!!