The San Joaquin County Wilderness Report

So, I was in the bathroom (because where else would I be) when suddenly Eldest came bursting in going, “Mom! Mom?! – there’s a snake on the porch. A big one.”

I took a moment to contemplate this information.

We don’t actually see very many snakes around here anymore. I probably see a lot more of them than anybody else in the house, because I spend more time out in the yard – and mostly what I see is the flick of a tail skedaddling back under the fence into the ranches on the other side.

And they’re almost never more than 1-2 feet long from tip of tongue to whip of tail.

So I was chuckling to myself a little bit as I dutifully tromped downstairs to observe the “big” snake, wondering to myself why it was that just about every human ever has categorized any snake big enough to be seen with the naked eye as being “big.” 

And then I looked out the front window and thought, Dang…you know what? She’s right. That’s a decent-sized snake right there.

I’ll admit that for a moment, I hesitated.

I’m no herpetologist and thus to me, the difference in body markings between a harmless old gopher snake (which was what I was pretty sure it was) and a super-scary-must-call-animal-control-and-scream-incoherently-until-they-send-somebody-out-to-deal-with-it rattlesnake are not “totally obvious at first glance.”

So even though I’m fairly sure I’d have a better chance at being struck by lightning twice in rapid succession while clutching a winning Super Lottery Ticket in one hand and tickets to Hamilton in the other than to walk outside and find an actual rattlesnake on my front porch – well, let’s just say it would be just my luck to confidently stomp outside to clear off a “gopher snake” and end up in the ER explaining over and over again how I’d managed to take a rattlesnake bite right on the nose.

So I took my time and observed for a bit until I was 200% certain that what I had on my porch was in fact a gopher snake.

And then I spent a few more moments pondering what I wanted to do about it.

I mean, I couldn’t just leave him where he was – it’s a high-traffic area, with a lot of kids pounding to and fro all day and night. The last thing I wanted was for one of the precious little snowflakes to go fleeing home screaming about a “huge” snake, summoning their fathers out with shovels or what-have-you to “dispose” of it.

But at the same time, I didn’t want to really scare him off.

Basically, what I wanted to do was shoo him in the direction of the back yard – because given my preference, I really would like him to stick around.

They eat gophers, y’all. And mice, rats, pigeons, squirrels – just about all the various varmints that like to get into my garden and destroy every last thing growing in it.

And a snake that size? Yeah. He’s a friend.

So I got my trusty broom, went out onto the porch, stood well back from his business end and started sweeping a few inches behind his tail. Snakes can be remarkably delicate, actually – what we consider a “gentle nudge” can really hurt them, so I didn’t want to, you know, actually nudge him with the broom.

He did not like this. He gave me a warning hiss (have you ever heard a gopher snake hiss? it is impressively loud), and pulled back like he was going to take a big old bite out of that broom.

So I pulled it back and we stared each other down for a minute. Then I swept a few more times a little bit further away from his tail and he was all, FINE. Be that way. I didn’t want to be on your stupid porch anyway…

…aaaaaaand he pushed on over to sulk in the rosemary bushes for a little bit while I went back inside and we all peered at him through the window.

Once he was sure the coast was clear, he casually made his way along the front of the house and zip! under the fence into the backyard.

Yessssssssssss!

I hope you find fertile hunting grounds back there, my friend – please, take two gophers, no, no, I insist…

It all started with a lemon…

I was sitting at my desk late one afternoon avoiding chores watching the squirrels a couple weeks ago, and they had once again gotten themselves a lemon off the lemon tree.

But unlike the last time I watched them, they were actually eating it.

They clearly did not like it, but nevertheless, they screwed up their little squirrely faces and took nibble after resolute nibble.

My first thought was, Dammit, they’re going to DECIMATE that tree this year.

Then I thought, …wait…why are they torturing themselves like that…?

And then the obvious reared up and smacked me in the back of the head. My yard looks exactly like all the yards right now; and like most of the fields around here, too.

Dry, cracked ground. No sprinklers running, ever. Water being rationed out manually on an irregular basis as sparingly as possible, with extra care given to ensuring it doesn’t pool up or overflow. Areas that would normally be lush with growing vegetables just empty beds, waiting for the drought to loosen its chokehold on us.

Shoot, half of the trees around here are dead – the water table has dropped so low that they just can’t cope. Wells are running dry all over the area, smaller farms are shutting down for the duration, the sloughs are dropping so low that they’re being closed to anything bigger than an inflatable raft…

…they don’t want to eat the lemons, they’re desperate for the juice inside them.

Yes, I felt sorry for them, but mostly I found myself contemplating what was going to happen to the handful of things I am still trying to grow; devil a tomato was I going to get, if those squirrels were really hungry or thirsty. I could forget about my moccasin beans, too. And they’d probably eat every last one of those lemons.

And hate every last nibble of it.

Sigh.

There are two basic ways to go about dealing with tree squirrels when they decide to move into your yard: You can go to war, or you can try to figure out a way to live together.

Considering that they have been amusing the heck out of me with their antics on and around the lumber and masonry piles, and given that I’m not particularly interested in entering into a prolonged period of having traps or poisons out in an attempt to eradicate them (which is seldom more than a momentary victory anyway, another tribe is going to move in right behind the one you just got rid of) – I decided to go with the “negotiate” method.

I’ve put out a small water thing like this one in the shade right next to the nesting den – they can get a drink without having to expose themselves to the hunting hawks and crows.

I’ve also started leaving them little (very little, I don’t want to be either their sole source of food or start having so much food out that all the varmints from everywhere want to move in) caches of Critter Food (designed for squirrels and their cousins – I don’t want to end up making them sick!) in and around the storage areas – well away from my garden beds, but where I can still watch them going through their acrobatics to get at them. And also where they have a lot of places to hide if…well, when, there really isn’t much if there…a crow or hawk decides to have a go at them.

I figured if I could give them easier access to stuff they actually liked more they might be willing to be content with it – so far, it seems to be working. I started doing this last weekend, and guess what? Not even one more lemon has been endured by the Squirrel Clan. They’ve also stopped digging around in my potato containers, stealing unripe tomatoes, and putting tooth marks into my bean pods.

For bonus points, Momma Squirrel has become even more territorial than she always was (which was pretty darned territorial – after all, this is her nest and her kits we’re talking about here); this afternoon, a rather large interloper dared to poke his nose into the yard, and she ran him off almost before he’d even gotten a paw fully onto this side of the fence. You go, momma!

Well, we’ll see how it goes.

On the bright side, I have to say: I’m really enjoying having them around. A lot more than makes sense, really…I’m not even all that mad about the lost tomatoes, come right down to it. Watching the squirrel-babies growing up is better than a thousand Netflix videos, and somehow every time I catch a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye and glance up just in time to see one of them make an insane leap from one shelf of masonry to another – a leap three or four times their entire body length and with a nasty plummet ahead if they missed – it just kind of makes me smile, you know?

You’re insane, little squirrels. You’ve got more guts than sense, you go for what you want, you’re amazingly graceful even when you’re taking a face-plant because you misjudged how stable that stick you were jumping from was, you are totally OK with just flopping for a quick nap in the middle of a romp and basically you’re just so in the moment, all the time. 

I respect and admire that, more than I like to admit.

…rock on, you little lunatics, rock on…

The Garden Report: April 12, 2015

Well – it’s going to be an interesting year. It has become very, VERY clear that our big drought out here in California is only digging in for the long-haul, not easing up.

So I’ve cut way, way back on my plans for this year; I have a feeling that just about anything I do plant now in these milder months I’ll just have to watch die later this summer, when we no longer have a drop of dew in the mornings, and the sun is mercilessly beating down on everything.

I’m not exactly giving up on the garden entirely – it’s more that I’m having to take a big step back and come back at it with a different perspective on things.

Basically, I have to be able to keep things alive using more greywater than fresh city water; I have to rework the way I plant and protect to be increasingly water-aware. And able to hand-water – I won’t be able to rely on the drip system to take care of it for me, I will need to have time every day to get out there and individually take care of every single one of them. Egads.

I’ll also have to make more and better use of greywater, and figure out just how much I can reasonably do on a lot less water than I’ve used in years past.

For the moment, I’m focusing on keeping the longer-term investment plants alive. The fruit trees, rhubarb and rosemary, the artichoke bushes and the blackberries. If I can at least keep those reasonably well-watered and alive for now, I’ll call that a win; if I have enough water left over, I’ll think about putting a couple of the beds back into use. I have a feeling it is possible, but I’m just not sure right now.

The only real news in the garden right now is both related and kind of sad – this big old tree is officially, and completely, dead.

We stopped watering the lawn last year because of the drought and local watering restrictions – but we’d thought the tree had deep enough roots to be tapping into the ground water. Nope. The water table has dropped so low over the last couple years that even a tree of this size couldn’t find enough water to sustain itself.

Farewell, old fellah. We appreciated all the shade you gave us during the long, hot days of summer. You’ll be missed.

(But we won’t miss the bird poop – yes, that’s what the white stuff on Homer is, the birds also love the tree and show their appreciation…copiously. Note the lack of street parking – not shown is the enthusiastic nature [or as some have put it, the black and petty souls] of the suburban answer to the meter maid, who love to start slapping pink and orange notices on your windshield if you park on the main thoroughfare up around that corner for more than, say, eighteen seconds. The birds, they have had us RIGHT where they want us, for LO these many years…)

Meanwhile in other news…

Man, it was so hard going to work Monday; I spent Saturday dealing with some long-overdue kitchen purging and reorganizing, and Sunday cleaning up this beautiful stretch of back fence.

I stubbornly kept at it until the light was fading, but was still a bit disappointed that this was all the farther I got.

Left side, pretty darned nice, if a little SPARSE with the bark here and there! Right side…eh, let’s not talk about the right side…(it’s the horseradish over there, which right now looks like death and scorched earth, but it’s already starting to green up and before we know it, it’ll be like BAM! enormous horseradish bushes going, “Pfffft, what death? We’re fine, and trying to figure out how we can jump the concrete here and take over that side of the fence, too…!” – it’s really a waste of money to put down good bark or other mulches over there, as the horseradish don’t care and will totally cover that whole side once it gets going.)

I did get four new rhubarb plants into the ground, the frames restrung and peas planted around them, so, you know – it’s hardly like “nothing” got done there.

But it still just…felt like it took a lot longer than it “should” have taken; and man, when I got up the next morning, the aching and pain-ing from all over was just plain epic.

In related news, WHEREAS I cannot handle the aging I have already done, BE IT HEREWITH RESOLVED that any further aging is a NON-STARTER and that HENCEFORTH, my physical aging shall match my mental aging, which means that I am now twenty-three going on eleven thank you very much and here I shall stay, FOREVER.

The End.

In unrelated news…I have started pulling into the driveway, stopping slightly more abruptly than technically necessary, and barking, “Get OUT…of my VAN!” at the Denizens.

Because, like you after you play this music video, this song has been perpetually stuck in my head ever since I first heard it. You’re welcome.

…come along and riiiiiiiide…in my burrito vaaaaaaaaan…!

The garden report: January 18, 2015

I stepped out into my realm last weekend to find, predictably…utter anarchy. The Supreme Ruler had, after all, been completely laid up for a full month, and had then had a verrrrrrrrrrry slow return to ‘being mobile’ after that.

Last month we had almost two full weeks of nearly non-stop rain; this naturally led to an explosion of weeds. Plus the construction crews have…not exactly had ‘keeping the yard tidy’ at the top of their priority list, either.

In short, it is an absolute nightmare out there right now.

A view of construction trash through the scaffolding, with weed riot.

Garden bed, now with bonus broken roofing tiles stacked on the sprinkler manifold.

You know what this strawberry bed needs? MORE ROOFING TILES! And also some PLYWOOD!

More weeds and debris…

Aaaaaaaaand, even MORE weeds and debris…

Perhaps we can just take it as-read that the ENTIRE yard is pretty much an enormous cesspool of weeds, machinery that REALLY should have been overwintered somewhere ELSE, masonry that NOBODY remembers putting “there” and yet “there” it is and so forth??

But, in among all the sedition, there were a few loyal subjects. Like the “dead” artichoke plant which suddenly exploded back to life.

If all goes well, we should have artichokes by Easter!

(Although to be more accurate, “the” artichoke plant actually is still dead – these are its children, about five of them, which grew up out of shoots that were just dormant during the drought and heat wave.)

There were some ‘forgotten’ carrots.

And a fair amount of spinach. Very sweet spinach, courtesy of the “light frost” weather.

And one absolutely gorgeous head of lettuce. (Seriously. Delicious.)

It took almost the entire weekend just to collect together the masonry and random wood planks and such from Everywhere, and stack it neatly in the future greenhouse masonry storage unit.

This is one (1) of the shelves. I filled four (4) of them altogether. We have a LOT of bricks, slabs, tiles, lumber of all sorts etc. Almost ALL of it from Freecycle, which is an AMAZING source of Such Things around here.

I cleaned up around the artichokes, dropped a Tree Gator Jr. around it even though right now there is so much moisture in the air that the soil is damp 24/7…and then ringed it with river rocks from all over the yard to further encourage water to stay put.

It seems happier now.

And then I got busy on that big old pile of fill-dirt and the just general trash all over the back 40 (yards).

This. Took. FOREVER.

In related news, I overdid it a little bit last weekend.

And by “a little bit” I mean “rather a lot.”

And I paid for it for quite a few days last week. Man. It was like I had a fish hook caught in my calf or something; my foot started swelling up again, and trying to sleep was like hahahahahaha, good luck with that!

Meh.

So today when I got back out there to start building the new beds, and I got one lousy bed (mostly) done and then that muscle started going, “Twinge! Twinge! TWINGE!” while my back was going, “Twitch! Twitch-twitch! TWITCH-TWITCH-TWITCH!!” and shooting little electric shocks up and down my other leg, I abandoned my plan to build two beds today and contented myself with just the one.

Dropped some broccoli seed in there, covered it up with plastic to discourage cats and construction crews looking for places to dump their trash, and called it a day.

I have to admit, this is something that I struggle with – identifying the point at which ‘reasonable’ becomes ‘unreasonable,’ and where I should be stopping, and what the consequences of not finishing everything on my list exactly when I wanted to actually are.

I always feel as if not finishing “everything” means that epic disaster is going to befall; like the whole thing is now jinxed and I’m going to have to work twice as hard to catch up the next time I’m out there.

But I seldom actually stop and ask myself what happens if I don’t try to double-down on the effort next time – what happens if it simply takes twice as long to finish.

For some things, it is a bit of a disaster; not harvesting things when they’re ready tends to mean you end up with compost rather than food, not paying bills on time results in late fees, stuff like that.

…but still not, you know, end of life as we know it sorts of consequences.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep that in mind as we stroll leisurely toward the next main growing season, and find a lot more enjoyment out of the process than I’ve had the last couple seasons.

The Garden Report: July 6, 2014

I haven’t been doing a lot of gardening the last few weeks; mostly, I’ve just been dashing out, grabbing anything that looked ready off the vine or bush, and running back into the Den as quickly as I could.

This has mostly been due to it being nightmarishly hot the last couple weeks, especially on my precious weekends – and hot from very early in the morning, just to add insult to injury.

There was a time when I would have talked myself into doing the work anyway, on the theory that if paid gardeners can take it (which they do, all the time), well, so can I.

That time has passed.

I am older and wiser now.

Well. Older, and more experienced now. And repeated experience has taught me that overdoing things is only going to lead to sorrow. So in my continuing attempts to be smarter, dammit, I have eschewed things like attempting to garden in direct sunlight on days when the average temperature is in the three digits.

I can be taught, apparently.

But I digress.

It was still pretty darned hot this weekend too, but Sunday was finally at-least-not-triple-digits so I finally got out there to actually DO stuff.

The green beans have begun their mad production period. I’d already pulled about two pounds from the bushes last week during one of the mad-dash afternoon harvesting expeditions, so I knew what to expect when I went out there “for real” today. Which was bushes loaded down with beans.

(They’re a little hard to see – the main cluster is pretty much dead-center, and every bush has at least three clusters like this!)

We ended up with seven pounds of them. Good grief!

I told Captain Adventure he could have his turn on the Wii after we – we – had picked the green beans. So in spite of his absolute hatred of the Outside…

…ugh, ugh, ugh, this is HORRIBLE, the green-growing-thing is TOUCHING me! It might have BUGS! it might have DIRT! This sunshine-stuff feels like sandpaper on my skin! I hate this! AAAAH! BUG! BUG! THERE’S A BUG!

A pair of gloves between his skin and the icky unfamiliar feeling of green-growing-things bought us a few more beans-picked…

…but then I relented and let him flee back to the relative comfort of the Den. (But no games until the job was done. That was the deal, and now it’s going to take twice as long, bud.) (Ah, the delicate balance between making him at least TRY stuff he doesn’t like and not pushing him too hard and ending up with an autism-driven meltdown on your hands) (<= those are not fun, for anybody involved).

Shortly after that, guess what showed up?

…this is the rarely-sighted Boo Bug, also not exactly the biggest lover of things involving DIRT or BUGS…

Here, the Boo Bug is seen reluctantly posing with a bean, making the ‘my mom is a lunatic’ face.

And then a wasp flew by. End of Denizen assistance. (I can’t really blame her. Unlike the gentle bumblebee who only stings as a last resort upon being backed into a corner or the scary-looking-but-actually-harmless soldier fly, wasps are like the drunken asshole bar fighters of the insect world. Oy, you! yeah, YOU, ugly! Get outta my Outside with your ugly face! Ohhh, you’re askin’ for it, mate, you’re askin’ for it, you wanna piece of me? do ya? do ya?! I’M FOR YA! {sting-sting-sting-sting-sting})

The husband and his buddy were working on the greenhouse, so of course as I’m going, ‘C’mon, honey, hold up the bean! Boo! C’mon, show me the bean you just picked! Pleeeeeeeeease, just humor me, OK?!” he’s all, “Hey, aren’t you going to take a picture of me out here working on your greenhouse?!”

Of course, he says this after I’ve hit the lock button and put the phone back in its holster. So then I’m all, “OK, hang on…don’t move…stay still…gotta unlock my phone…darn it…hang on, DON’T MOVE! It’s trying to find your face…”

And that’s why he looks like he’s caught between laughing and an angry tirade in this picture.

(Yeahhhhh, my phone is really not meant for ‘action’ shots. It does a great job with still-life stuff, but it takes approximately forever plus ten years to actually snap anything. I have a crazy number of colorful blurs from Denizen events where I’ve tried to capture them, say, walking across a stage, or talking with friends.)

I found a few aphids starting to make themselves at home in the beans, and was thinking I might need to break out the soap…but then I found that the troops were arriving to handle the problem for me.

Ah, glad you’re here, Colonel. Carry on, and I shall leave my mostly-useless-by-the-time-the-damage-is-noticeable-anyway organic insect-soap in the shed…

The zucchini bushes are not long for this world; they were actually planted in a spot that is about to become part of a construction project we’re doing. BUT, until they actually break ground, I’m going to continue enjoying a few zucchinis a week from them.

(These are Renee’s Garden ‘Raven’ zucchini. The two things I love best about them are that they don’t sprawl all over the place but instead maintain a nice, compact bush, and that they aren’t as pokey as other zucchini bushes. They can still bring me out in a rash if I disrespect them, but they don’t go out of their way to do it like some zucchini bushes seem to; but – and I’m not sure if this is the zucchini plant, or the nasty weather at work, so, grain of salt, y’all – I have noticed that they also don’t seem to produce as wildly as others I’ve grown. Which is not actually automatically a bad thing, since I’ve had years where we’ve all come to despise the very SIGHT of a zucchini due to too darned many of them syndrome)

The cucumber vines are loving the heat; ever since it started getting too hot for us human-types, they’ve been flourishing.

I love looking into the little valley between the two rows. It’s like a little secret cucumber forest or something.

These are actually pickling cucumbers; right now, the bushes are giving us one or two “full sized” cucumbers a week, but I’m seeing a lot of baby-cukes on there right now so I suspect in another couple weeks, we’ll get the main flush and be able to start making some pickles.

Dear Cucumber: Please do not let the zucchini put on airs and pretend you aren’t related. While it is true that you are genus cucumis while zucchini are cucurbita, you are both of the same Cucurbitaceae family. You both have a long and luscious history of being beloved by humans, and have been written into our songs and legends. Stand proud, my warty little friend!

The yellow beans really wish they weren’t in the middle of all this. Also they wish that I would be more consistent about weeding their bed.

Speaking of weeds, just because it was too hot for me to be out there doing stuff for the last few weeks doesn’t mean it was too hot for the weeds to come out to play. No indeed.

My new “potato squares” were 100% covered in purslane.

This is something new I’m trying: Usually I dig a deep hole, plant the potatoes, and then basically fill up the hole as they grow. These are planted at a more modest depth, in the center of stone squares. As the bushes (hopefully) grow, I’m going to add layers of additional stone around them and fill them in; what I’m hoping for most is an easier time getting at the potatoes at the end of all things, because frankly trying to dig them out is a royal pain in the neck. And back. And I end up slicing through a remarkable number of them, no matter how slowly and carefully I try to go. Argh. I’ve got Red Pontiac, Yukon Gold, and Blue Nile potatoes in the ground – here’s hoping they decide to sprout for me.

And then…there was this.

Yeahhhhhhh, I *may* have neglected this corner a BIT longer than I should have.

So I started weeding. And weeding. And weeding. And I found the new box I’d slapped together because I thought I would grow some beets in it. And I started pulling out the yet more purslane from it and guess what I found?

Some of the leggiest beets I have ever seen.

Seriously, isn’t that pathetic. Those poor things have been streeeeeetching out, trying to get even a little light. I’m not sure if they really can be saved, but I’m going to try to at least give them a chance…seems the least I can do, after planting and then ignoring them so badly all this time.

This is how far I got before I got slammed with The Tireds and said, “OK, stopping now.”

Holy smokes, this was a lot of weeds.

Super-full.

On the way back in, I stopped to check the tomato bushes; most of them are teasing us with plentiful but very green fruits.

But we do have at least some color, here and there.

That’s about it for last week in the garden; the list of things I want to do keeps getting longer and longer, while the list of things I actually get done seldom seems to grow at all.

Hopefully the weather will work with me a bit more soon, and I’ll be able to turn that around; until then, I’ll just be grateful for what I’ve gotten done, and enjoy having something from our own yard for dinner more often.

The Garden Report: May 18, 2014

A lot has been happening in the garden this year; unfortunately, most of it is the kind of work that doesn’t necessarily show.

The bane of my existence right now is this.

 

Doesn’t look like that big a deal, does it. This is a pile of dirt that measures about 3’ high, 5-6’ wide, and 15’ long. It’s all the dirt excavated from the greenhouse site, and it all has to go somewhere else.

Happily, there really isn’t any such thing as too much garden-bed dirt. I’ll need every last grain of sand in that pile somewhere.

Unfortunately, this is not garden-bed dirt yet. I can’t just toss shovelfuls into the wheelbarrow, race across the yard and dump them into beds.

Well, I could, I suppose – but it wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good.

It is clay with a lot of trash in it (bits of concrete and broken glass from the original construction, the green webbing from the original sod, bits of broken plastic toys from its time as ‘support for the play structure’, etc.) and absolutely zero nutrients left.

So before I can dump it into a bed and start growing things, I need to tinker with it; sift out the trash, mix in things like finished compost, peat moss and vermiculite to lighten it up a bit and add back some nutrients.

It’s a lot of hard, sweaty, really dirty work. The kind of work that when you come in after a few hours of doing it and get into the shower? The water running off you is murky.

And it is slow-going. I feel like I’ve been doing battle with that damned pile for months, and it only just started to look like I’ve made any progress.

But that aside…what else is new? Well, we started a small orange grove in the front.

These are three different kinds of dwarf orange trees, each of which is supposed to fruit up at a different time of year – hopefully, once they get comfortable, we’ll have some kind of orange to enjoy for all but a few months each year. The one in the middle is trying to set some fruit, but I’ll be very surprised if anything actually comes of it – they’re still babies.

The horseradish has done its usual oh, is it spring? I’M HERE!

Of the five currants I planted, only one is still thriving at all.

The rhubarb made me so happy; I was 100% certain that it was completely dead. And then it was all, Nope, I’m still here.

This whole area needs a makeover right now; it’s a tremendous mess, but, it also suffered the worst impact from the damned gophers this year.

I started to pull out the poppies, but they were too pretty. Plus there was chamomile in there. And if the one wasn’t pretty enough, the two of them together are kind of swoon-worthy. So I left them alone. 

We’ve gotten a few artichokes this year, but I have to say: The plants are not doing too hot, overall. They aren’t getting particularly good growth; I think the “old” plants died over this last winter, so we’re only getting growth on their newest babies. Circle of life and all that. 

Meanwhile, we have been discovered by the rabbits: I looked out the kitchen window one evening to see one happily perched on the edge of the bed, daintily nibbling on the celery I’d just transplanted.

Your move, Wabbit…

(The white stuff is coyote pee. So not only is the celery caged up, it is surrounded by Eau d’Predator.)

Likewise, the squirrels have discovered the Shangri La that are our trees. The stone fruit tree was trying to create some fruit for us.

But the squirrels had a marvelous time picking each and every one of them, taking one bite out of it, and going, “BLECH! NASTY UNRIPE FRUIT! Hmm. Maybe this one will be tasty-good…BLECH!” <= lather, rinse, repeat.

Dumb animals.

I’ve got some cucumbers starting to catch their stride.

I had to replant and cage a bunch of these as well, since the disgruntled rabbits didn’t waste much time moving over to this bed; while they’re still small, those little green baskets like strawberries come in work really well for it.

I made a new, small-ish bed-of-sorts and dropped some zucchini into it; as always with that plant, they are plotting world domination. I’m pretty sure we’ll have a good 5-6 decent-sized zucchinis to enjoy this week. This is a thing with zucchini, they go from “hmm, I think that’s going to be a squash eventually” to “holy mother of gahd, that thing is enormous!” seemingly overnight.

These guys actually came out today – dropped a couple wheelbarrows of fresh soil in there and planted kidney beans with a red onion border to help keep the pests down a bit. (That works pretty darned well, by the way – once those onions start sprouting, they do a really good job deterring creepy-crawlies.)

There’s a lot more back there – spinach, broccoli, golden beets, green beans, cantaloupe, carrots, yellow and candy onions, strawberries, and about eight different kinds of heirloom tomatoes.

It’s going to be a busy year; and hopefully a productive one as well. The last couple seasons have really sucked, mostly because I just didn’t put the time and energy into it that I needed to if I wanted anything to come of it.

But this year feels different. This year feels like it is moving again, like all the things that were just sitting there waiting for something, something I couldn’t seem to find…found their motivation.

Maybe it’s this: A bunch of scrap metal lying all over the yard suddenly starting to transform into a greenhouse.

It’s going to be something else, isn’t it?!