Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category

That’s my chiles before stringing up on strong thread to dry. Those small red ones are supposed to be ancho/poblano peppers, but they are NOT. Too small, wrong shape, and too thin walled even when they were green. The longer ones are anaheims, not a good variety. Again, these ones are too small.

All I can say is… don’t buy chile pepper seeds from a company called “Totally Tomatoes”!!! LOL!

The strings of them are hanging up to dry in various spots in the house… whereever I could find a place. Except for the hooks holding up the light over my craft table, there are NO other ceiling hooks in this house. I need to remedy that someday…

And the kitten photo… this is Freckles, the last of the kittens. My neighbor across the hiway adopted the little grey and white kitten AND she came back and adopted the chocolate brown kitten, too! I tried to talk her into taking one of the bigger kittens, but they liked the little ones the best.

Other than Freckles, all the other cats are either teenager kittens or grown ups. Freckles doesn’t mind… he will cuddle with anyone he can. Since the weather went suddenly cool… I go out on the porch and the cats, all of them, will be in a big pile! Too funny!

I think this is it for tonight… got chores to do.

Vyx

Last week I took some squash and tomatoes across the road. The kids came outside, their Mom was too busy to come to the door.

I noticed a screen topped aquarium on the porch. “Whatcha got in there?”

A snake. Ooh, really? I can’t see anything except some crickets and grasshoppers.

They did, they had the smallest baby snake I’ve ever seen. And insects for it to eat that there is NO WAY that poor baby could have eaten them.

To cut things short, I told them that it would probably die if they kept it, so could I take it and let it go?

Yep! So I brought it home, took some photos, and let it go in my flower bed.

Here are the pictures. That’s a regular sized mayonnaise jar to give you an idea of the size.

So, I have no idea what kind of snake it is. I don’t really care. I don’t like poisonous snakes in the yard, of course, but everything has a reason for living. And after I found out that we killed a king snake in the dog pen a few weeks ago… not knowing what kind of snake it was, and it was dark and upsetting the dogs… well, here I am putting a new snake into the yard. (King snakes are GOOD snakes, darn it)

I am not afraid of any kind of snake… have actually picked up a copperhead because I didn’t know what it was. And it was dark. And you know me, I’m fearless, lol! (plus I know how to handle snakes so as to not get bit)

Anyhow. I went back to work a week ago yesterday. Back to my old job that I got let go from back in February. Things are different, things are the same. The worst thing is that they no longer have a 3 min warning bell in the afternoon… it’s just a ONE min warning. That’s not enough time to clean up or anything. Heck, it’s hardly enough time to just DROP everything and get out of there. I guess the new kids they have there were lining up to clock out at the warning instead of cleaning up.

It ticks me off. I was always ready to dash out anyhow… I get to work at least 20 min early. I clean, I set up, I’m ready and probably working before the day starts. I don’t live right around the corner, tho, so I want to LEAVE when it’s time, not still be putting stuff away. I NEED that 3 min in the afternoon. Grrr.

Otherwise the job is good. I’m stuck off by myself with good soldering irons and a microscope, and I’m changing parts out on DVD player boards. Boring, sort of, but I don’t have to deal with anyone else most of the time. Hey, electronics assembly IS pretty boring. I need to find out the personal music player policy… I might finally need to get myself that MP3 Player I’ve sort of wanted for a while.

This is all for tonight…

After dog walking tonight, I wandered down to the berry hedge to see what was up. And to check on tomatoes and peppers of course.

I walked around to the east side and yes, still plenty of berries not being eaten up by bugs yet.

Got to the end and looked up. There is something furry sitting there. Is that a possum? A raccoon? It’s awful small…. a baby something.

Went back around to the west (the side that faces the house) and had a better look without sun glaring in my eyes. I thought it was a cat, but all our cats are at the house having their dinner kibble.

It’s a baby raccoon. No, didn’t think about running back to the house for my camera. I just couldn’t believe that a raccoon of any size would be sleeping in the berries. He was perched way up high, and sound asleep. Oh, he’d shift every so often, but you could still tell he was sound asleep. Wish I’d thought of my camera!

Where is his Momma? I look down and there are lots of trails beaten into the grass and mulch and stuff. Evidently this guy went to sleep and Momma left him. Perhaps all the berries are NOT being eaten by bugs, but by raccoons! Heck, the raccoons are probably eating any bugs in the berries, too.

Poor little guy. Left in the berry hedge. But now I know why my dogs are way interested in the berries these days.

And maybe that burrow under the berry hedge has a Momma Raccoon, not a family of armadillos! I thought raccoons lived in trees, but you never know… and raccoons sticking close would explain why I’m missing an 8 week old kitten and one of my adult cats has chunks of flesh missing from his back.

(otoh, Sadie HAS been interested in eating berries lately… she has to stop to pull berries off the wild blackberries and when I took her to our berry hedge she was eating those, too. But only right off the vine… pick one for her and she turns her nose up at it, goofy dog)

Other news: I’m back to work on Monday. There will be a whole lot less late night posts from me. But I got called back to work like I was on lay off… and I’d thought I was fired. I’ve had a nice vacation, nearly 6 months of it and all thru the good part of the year. Was getting serious about finding another job, but nothing is really out there that I can do. So the job call back is a good thing.

hugs,
Vyx

It’s been hot here for ages. And no rain… I had to water the blackberries and I’ve not had to do that before. Dry and cool is weird tho. It’s been doing this off and on super low temps… Hey, sorry, I need a sweater if it gets much below 80.

These last few days… whoa! I need a sweater on! We are having record lows. It’s July, and the low tonight is supposed to get to 55!!!! Normal July temps don’t drop below 70.

Today we finally got rain along with the low temps. Thank goodness. I think we got about an inch of rain, looking into all the things that can collect rain outside. Sweet! Now if it would just do this again say on Friday morning, next Tuesday, and keep repeating until we catch up… I might be able to skip watering my plants.

The giant green june bugs that show up in July are eating the blackberries. We filled 1/4 of the chest freezer with bags of berries and then I went around to neighbors asking if they wanted to pick any. Kids across the street picked a good gallon or so…. Brent with the nice veggies didn’t show up as far as I know. I told him (and his parents) to just come over and pick em, no need to knock on door or anything. And that they’d better be quick, because the bugs were about to get all the berries.

I’m not picking any more. Let the bugs have them. When those giant green july bugs get in there, they are worse than the little japanese beetles… those suckers fly into you and almost knock you down.

But since our berries did so well this year… even tho they did have to be watered…. Ron and I talked about having a blackberry farm. With what we have now, we could expand greatly. We’d have to take over some of the hay/pasture field, but it could be done.

Then I remember how much work it is to pick the berries… and they have to be picked if you don’t get customers. And I’m not an early riser these days, altho I guess I could trrain myself to be again. Maybe we could do thornless blackberries, some blueberries… and some fall bearing raspberries.

What I want are seedless berries. If there are such a thing. I love the flavor of a ripe raspberry, or blueberry or strawberry or blackberry… and I hate seeds. Even the tiny seeds of strawberries… well, I can’t stand em. I hate those seeds crunching when I expect to be eating something soft and soothing.

With our luck, the people that cut our hay/pasture field down for hay would miss our fencing and just brushhog our new berry plants and run over the fence. People that drive tractors around here aren’t paying a whole lot of attention to what they are running over. The fence now has been there for years… if we put up new fence they might not notice it.

Pipe dream anyhow. But seeing how much people were charging for fresh blackberries at the farmers market in Fayetteville… I could have been making big bucks. $4 or $5 a pint, which is still way better than the small grocery store price of $4 a half pint… and I picked gallons, dang it.

I will be doing something with the berries I picked…. Ron doesn’t care if they’ve been frozen or not. Cooking em amounts to the same thing anyhow. And my Mother owns a really nice food mill that I’ve used to take the seeds out of raspberries…. just gotta borrow it from her. I love that thing. I used it the last time I picked and froze lots of raspberries…. and gave everyone jars of seedless jam. I need to do the same with the blackberries!

I think I’m finally getting tired…

g’night for tonight!

Tonights (non) adventure with Armadillos

Just like last night, we built a small fire in our small bonfire ring which is set on the hump left after the old barn burned down. It’s out in the yard, and next to where I usually will see the armadillos walking by. (We’ve had them come sniff around our legs out there when we were quiet and still and the fire was burning down to coals)

Last night we had our backs to the house. We kept checking every so often around us with lights, but never saw an armadillo.

Tonight, because the wind was in a different direction, we had to sit on the other side. Guess what I spotted out by my car? Yep, an armadillo. So I get the light, Ron gets his gun… and we can’t scare the armadillo out from under my car! Then when it does get out, it is basically standing between Ron’s feet. Seriously, armadillos are sort of immune to their surroundings unless it seems threatening. That almost on Ron’s feet was the best shot he had… all of a sudden the cats decided to help. Armadillo started waddling away, next best shot had too many cats too close. We thought we’d head it off around the storm cellar, but it must have started going at a good clip, because when we got around the cellar there was no armadillo.

Mr Armadillo lives for another day. Ron thinks we may have scared it enough it wouldn’t be back tonight, but I’m not betting on that. We have armadillo burrows all over the place around the property. The one that is braving the cats is NOT the only one. It’s just the one we have been seeing.

I don’t know how much people know about armadillos… I know quite a bit, because I had to find out. Armadillos have no real teeth… they have stumps of bone that are like molars, that’s it. They have babies, live birth as they are mammals… and the babies are always in 4′s and all the same sex. Oh, and baby armadillos are SOFT, not hard shelled. The shells on armadillos are not a shell like a turtle. The shell is more like hair that turns hard, not a true shell. Their bellies stay furry. And there are lots of different kinds of armadillos, but we only really see one kind in the USA… which have been moving steadily north for the last 100 years.

Sometime last year I figured out that the burrow under the blackberries had armadillos… and babies. I’d read that strong smells would make them leave the burrow. I SO wanted to see armadillo babies. I had some ammonia water from cleaning and I had Ron carry the bucket down and pour it down. Nothing happened. They may have had another exit… Armadillo burrows can go as deep as 7 feet underground. And I don’t know how long, or if they are like rabbits with an escape exit. What clued me to the babies was… hundreds of little digging holes right around that burrow. When food is plenty, armadillos just dig a hole here and there, a small cone shaped hole to get what they want. Babies? Well, it was like walking thru a mini mine field, all these tiny diggings. I was very disappointed when I didn’t get to make them come out to see me. (pay backs, now they are all rooting around the house!)

When food is not so plentiful armadillos dig like crazy. The yard is starting to look like someone is coming in at nights with a small rototiller. All around the foundations of the house, around the water hose area, around where the heat pump spits water out… rototiller work. Oh, and around the tree wher we had a sprinkler going the other day to try it out. We don’t water lawns here… while we appreciate green grass, it’s a lot of work to keep it mowed. Just as well… if we were watering I’m sure the armadillos would just be digging up more of the yard.

Could be worse I guess. They haven’t been getting my flowers that much, just the one flower box. And staying away from veggies, but that is probably because the veggies are surrounded with black plastic. But before I’d moved here with Ron, the only armadillos I’d ever seen were on the road, and usually dead. Now I see em all the time. Heck, even a close up visit the other night, poking that one. (yes, that was a bit crazy, even for me)