Gopher Snake

Yesterday's post about the mysterious lack of California Ground Squirrels this year may be explained by the next door neighbor's sighting of a five foot long snake in her back yard yesterday afternoon.

We didn't see the snake, but I'm guessing it's a California Gopher Snake, Pituophis catenifer annectens.  They range in length from 2.5 to 7 feet in length, but are usually about 4 or 5 feet long.  They eat small mammals, especially pocket gophers, but also eat birds and their eggs, lizards and insects.

The Gopher Snake tends to react defensively when disturbed by hissing, rearing back and striking.  It also makes a buzzing sound by shaking its tail, emulating the sound a rattlesnake makes.  This behavior may make some predators back off and leave the snake alone, but it also results in humans killing Gopher Snakes unnecessarily.  

Far from fearing these snakes, some dedicated gardeners even try to buy them to protect their gardens from the depredations of gophers and ground squirrels.

We're guessing from the recent absence of ground squirrels that the snake has already been in our yard, but it's welcome back anytime.

Baby Bust

Last year about this time we saw a population explosion among the California Ground Squirrels. See "Baby Boom".  Big Mama had produced a litter of at least seven baby squirrels, all as cute as a bug's ear and as voracious as, well, as a litter of ground squirrels.  They camped under our bird feeder and stuffed themselves for weeks on the seed that the finches and sparrows spit out onto the ground.  The baby squirrels must have eaten a couple of pounds of bird seed among them.  Then, at the end of June, they dispersed and we only saw them occasionally.

We saw Big Mama under the bird feeder in February gorging on bird seeds, so we've been watching for this year's crop of baby squirrels, but so far have not seen any squirrels at all.

That makes us wonder:   Did something happen to Big Mama?   Did some predator, such as the Tree Fox or a coyote or the hawk get them all?  Are they just late?  Did they find a better feeder?

Maybe the coyote poop we saw out behind the fence a couple of weeks ago had something to do with it.

The Real Poop

Wild Cucumber Seeds?

Well, there's no delicate way to put this, but Cindy found a large cluster of poop outside our back fence the other day.

Covered with poop were some odd looking nuts; strangely familiar looking nuts.  

In fact, I think these are very much like the Marah macrocarpus seeds we found a couple of years ago that had been secreted in the corner of one of the raised beds.

Rodents and birds like Scrub Jays like to cache the seeds, and it looks like some animal may have found one of the caches and eaten the seeds.  Some rather large animal.

And, since all parts of the plant are supposed to be very bitter and cause numbness, somewhere there is probably a varmint with a very bad tummy ache.

Aunt Cindy's Traveling Tomato Wagon

Tomato Wagon

Cindy has been carefully raising the tomatoes for this year's crop, sprouting the seeds and keeping the seedlings under grow lights in her office for most of the last month.  Later she moved them outside to "harden off" before they can be transplanted, and then she planted them before we left for Indiana.

However, as usual, all the seeds she planted actually sprouted, so she had to find good homes for the ones she didn't have room for.

So her little red wagon was pressed into service to deliver the plants to a couple of the neighbors who also love tomatoes.

Siletz, Cherokee Chocolate, Grape Riesenstraube, Brandwine, Early Girl, Champion and Boxcar Willie.

Who wouldn't love a tomato called Boxcar Willie?

Tomatoes

Tomatoes In The Ground

Before we left for vacation, Cindy planted the tomatoes she had carefully raised from seeds.  She had planned to plant them in one of the newer raised beds behind the garage; she likes to rotate the crops and last year she had planted green beans in that bed.

However, she had evidently forgotten that last year the gophers had undermined that bed and gnawed off the roots of the bean stalks.  She didn't discover that for a while because she was using a mylar mulch to increase the light to that bed, and the varmints had simply tunneled under the cover of it and chewed away at their leisure.

This year when she went to plant the tomatoes, sure enough, there was a gopher hole in that bed.

So she ended up digging all the dirt out of the bed, cutting hardware cloth to fit, and stapling it to the sides of the frame.

We're hoping that will keep the varmints out, or else we'll have no tomatoes this year.

Mylar Mulch

Flight Behavior

I've just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's newest book, Flight Behavior.
Note:  If you're one of those tiresome people who don't like "spoilers", stop reading now because I'm going to discuss the book.

Monarch Butterfly

The central character in the book, Dellarobia Turnbow, discovers that Monarch butterflies have altered their pattern of overwintering in Mexico because of changing climatic conditions, and instead have descended upon a valley on her family's sheep-farming property in Tennessee.

Not just a few Monarchs, such as we get in our small butterfly garden in San Diego, but millions of them have come, clustering together like living flame to survive the winter and perpetuate the species if they can.  We have worked so hard to preserve the few Monarchs that have come to our yard; I can't imagine watching MILLIONS of them struggling to survive as a species.

It's a beautifully written book, delicately interweaving and balancing the disparate people who interact with the butterflies and each other, including the sheep farmers struggling to make a living, the ecotourists who come to marvel, the scientists who study the the Monarchs, the news media who seem willing to exploit any and all of them for a few minutes of air time, and Dellarobia herself, who is led to explore her own "flight behavior".

A difficult, enthralling, wonderful book.

Brava, Barbara Kingsolver.

          

Little White Flowers

White Mystery Flowers

These delicate white flowers have been popping up at several places around the garden this spring.

We have no idea what they are, or how they came to be here, but they're very pretty.  The leaves in this photo are those of a Nasturtium and don't belong to the white flowers, which have long, narrow, strap-like leaves.  The flower clusters are on long thin stalks.

Flowers With Partial Leaf

I'm starting to think this may be a member of the onion family; yesterday I noticed a thin membrane clinging to the base of a couple of the flower clusters, and it reminded me of the flowers on the Leeks and the Bunching Onions we've had the last couple of years.  The flowers of those plants are covered with a membrane before it splits open and the flowers emerge.

We knew what those plants were because Cindy had planted them and expected them to emerge where she had put them.

However, she didn't plant these, especially the one that's emerging in the middle of a path covered with decomposed granite (DG), because there's no dirt there and there is a layer of weed blocking fabric under the DG.

A gift from the gophers?  Some ground squirrel's pantry?  The secret stash of whichever varmint stole the False Sea Onion bulb last year?  

We'll probably never know.