As the latest election passed, a friend was left with piles of wire frames from political signs. These are rectangles with 4 legs, designed to hold signs with 2 wires, and go into the ground with the other two. He was going to toss them, and asked me one day if I had a use for them. It turns out, there is a great use for them, protecting small clumps of bulbs from deer. The central rectangle is 10 x 15 inches, or 25 x 38 cm. That's room for a nice little clump of bulbs. If you bend all the legs down, there is now a nice support for chicken wire shaped in half domes, to keep deer off clumps of tulips, and other bulbs they find tasty. A pair of vice grips and heavy pliers do the bending job. I have piles of old chicken wire around, ready to shape into domes over the frames, with some short pieces of extra wire to hold them to the frames. You can also wire old plastic signs, also left from the election, to the top rectangle, and have a shade, or a flat piece of 1/2 inch/1 cm mesh and have a cover over seed pots to keep the jays off. A gardening friend of mine shapes the chicken wire to fit up and over display pots for a client with deer problems, and puts the frame inside the container, plunged in the pot, to hold the chicken wire down. Painted black, the wires are not very noticeable. That stack of wire frames is now at my place, and going to work to protect bulbs. I've hesitated to grow hybrid tulips for years, because the deer eat the buds as they color up. Now I can plant clumps and know the deer can't easily get to them. Yes, I'll have to anchor the frames with long stakes, to ensure deer don't toss the frames out of the ground. Reduce/reuse/recycle! Kathleen Kathleen Sayce PNW Coast, WHZ 8, dryish cool summers & mild wet winters