Providing Sport For The Neighbors

Since "walking" cats involves prolonged periods of stopping to stare into the shrubbery waiting for invisible lizards to appear, I've been doing my Tai Chi Chih movements while I'm waiting for Princess to move on to something else.

I'm sure this has provided great amusement for our neighbors; we know they're already entertained by seeing cats walking around our yard on leashes, but seeing me doing the slow arm movements of Tai Chi Chih probably has them wondering about our sanity, too.

But I don't care what anyone thinks.  Since we've been walking the cats, both my back and my knees have been feeling much better, so I'm happy about that.

As Mr. Bennett says in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, "For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn."

Cat Walking

It may sound like a strange thing to do, but we've been taking two of our five cats for walks in the garden every day.

Ansel is our only male cat, and at about 15 years old, he's also our most senior cat.  When our newest female cat, Princess Fairweather Daintypaws, came into the household about two years ago, Ansel took decided exception to her presence, and began "marking" things with his own special scent.  Many things--furniture, rugs, walls, floors, doors, you name it, it was all HIS, and he wanted Princess, and the rest of the world to know it.  Princess, not one to shrink from a challenge, began her own counter marking campaign to let Ansel, and the rest of the world, know it was really all HERS.

We did the best we could with the situation, instantly deploying paper towels and solutions designed to eliminate the stains and distinctive odors of cat pee throughout the house, but it certainly didn't make life any fun.  We also made sure the Feliway Multicat dispenser was filled up and tried various other potions that were supposed to reduce tensions between competing felines, but those didn't seem to have much effect.

Several months ago Cindy proposed that we try taking them for walks outside and see if that would help.  I was reluctant to do that because my prior experience with attempting to walk cats with harnesses and leashes was not good; usually the cat would just hunker down and refuse to budge at all.  The best I could hope for was to drag the cat a couple of steps.  The only time it seemed to succeed was once when I was stationed in Berlin and took my cat Bilbo out to try to walk him.  Unlike the other times we had tried it, this time he took off running across the parking lot, practically dragging me behind him.  I thought this was a good sign that he was finally getting the idea, until I realized that what he was actually doing was chasing a rabbit into the Grunewald forest .  Whoa, Nellie, not going in there.

But this time, even if we had to drag them along, it seemed like just about the only thing that might make a difference to the situation, so we got a Come With Me Kitty harness and leash for each of them and started walking them twice a day for half an hour each time.  That is, it's half an hour unless it's raining (Princess Fairweather does NOT like to get her dainty paws wet), or the big scary garbage truck is rampaging up and down the street, or the neighbor is mowing the lawn, or the human boredom limits have been exceeded.

On the whole, though, it's gone fairly well.  Ansel loves to roll in the dirt and pretend he's a young macho dude again.

Love That Dirt Bath!

The Warm Driveway Is Great, Too!

Princess loves to hunt lizards and birds.  Fortunately, the harness and leash prevent her from getting too close to them--mostly.  She actually got her paws on one of the lizards the other day, but I managed to get it away from her before she did any real damage to it.  We saw it several times after that, so it apparently survived its close encounter with the large furry predator.

Is There A Lizard In the Raised Bed?

Or Behind The Trash Can?

Or In The Hedge?

Several good things have come from this:  first, the indoor potty contest has calmed down considerably; second, the cats aren't fighting as much inside; and third, it gets us outside and into the garden twice a day, so Cindy can plan her future garden projects and I can gather fodder for the blog.

Perfect Location To Watch Birds

Three Years Ago

Three years ago, while Cindy was undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer, some of our friends from the San Diego County Garden Guild invaded our front yard and weeded, pruned and planted new plants to cheer her up.  I thought I had written about that visit on this blog, but found that the post was on the Caring Bridge website instead.  She's feeling great now and able to garden again, but seeing how good the front garden still looks three years later reminded me of that difficult and very stressful period in our lives, and how a random act of caring and kindness by our friends meant so much to us at that time.  So here's that original post, and, thank you again, Garden Elves.  

A Visit From The Garden Elves 

Journal entry by Kay Teeters — Jan 26, 2017

Cindy had her third infusion of the Red Devil chemo on Tuesday, and while we were gone some of her gardening friends (with a little collusion from me) descended on our house to spruce up the bee and butterfly garden in our front yard, which was very much in need of some attention.  With all the rain we have been having the weeds had begun to spring up through the mulch; the roses always need pruning at this time of year and the Bougainvillea was so overgrown that it was threatening to take over the entire side of the house.  We knew all this needed to be done, but it seemed like such an overwhelming job that we just couldn't face it.

So the Garden Elves arrived, weeded, pruned, planted, raked and disappeared before we got home. I was debating whether to tell Cindy about it, but while we were on our way home a neighbor sent her a text telling her how nice the garden looked, so I had to explain what was going on--I had been biting my tongue for weeks to avoid spilling the beans and spoiling the surprise.  As it was, she had to wait until the next morning to see it in the daylight--she was like a kid on Christmas eve waiting to see the surprise.  It was a huge job, but it looks great, Cindy loves it and so do the birds, bees and butterflies.  See the photos by Jodi Bay in the Gallery section.  Thank you, Garden Elves! 

And here are some photos of how the bee and butterfly garden looks three years later.

Bee & Butterfly Garden

I Love Lavender, And So Do The Bees

Succulents Spilling Out

Grevillea?  Or Maybe Cousin It?  

Aaron's Beard

Lantana Looking Good

In The Time of Plague...

Giovanni Boccaccio's book The Decameron, according to Wikipedia, "is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by seven young women and three young men sheltering in a villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city."

It won't be anything close to the classic Decameron, but I though I could amuse at least myself during this period of "social distancing" by reviving my neglected garden blog and telling a few tales of gardening during the current virus plaguing the world.

Fortunately, gardening is an activity that can be done alone, and if you're a vegetable gardener, it's pretty much a full time occupation, so Cindy is outside right now planting carrots and lettuces.  She won't harvest them for many months, but it does get us looking ahead, toward the future, and whatever the future brings, we'll have something to eat.



Edited to add--It's not my intention to minimize the terrible struggle Italy is having with this deadly and highly contagious disease, but to show that there are positive things we can do while we are responsibly slowing or halting the spread of the disease.  

Mystery Solved... Maybe?

Two years ago we decided to install a fountain in the back yard, partly for our enjoyment and partly to provide a reliable water source for the birds that visit our shrubbery and bird feeders.  We had had a birdbath in the garden for some years, but we called it our "bird repelling fountain" because birds seemed reluctant to have anything to do with it.

We finally realized that the basin was too deep to interest the birds, even if we put rocks in the bottom of the basin, although in this picture clearly somebody, probably a largish canine somebody of the coyote variety, was interested in the water and knocked it over.  Since there was no pump, the water in it did not move and we had no desire to breed mosquitoes.

Old Birdbath--Somebody Wanted the Water

So we decided to put in a tower fountain with a pump so the water would circulate through it.  We found one we liked that had several levels so that the water bubbles up through the levels to the top level and then trickles down the sides to the basin at the base of the tower.  The guys who installed it had told us we could add some rocks to control the amount of bubbling from the top.

Tower Fountain, Complete With Birds

Things work reasonable well most of the time and the birds seem to love it, but last summer and again this year for the last couple of weeks, large quantities of water have vanished from the fountain overnight, almost every night.  We were baffled as to why so much water was disappearing.  Evaporation?  A pack of thirsty coyotes?  Raccoon bacchanalia?   Communal crow bathing?   Possibly a two-legged critter coming up through the canyon in search of water?  That last thought was a little unsettling.

Evaporation seemed unlikely since the water levels didn't change much during the hottest part of the summer days.  The water level would go down a little during the heat of hot summer days, but most of it seemed to go at night.  We knew that coyotes visit the garden from time to time--we've found piles of poop and other evidence of their presence, but it seemed unlikely that they would be here every night.

We were so curious that Cindy gave me a trail camera for Christmas.  The camera has a motion sensor and infrared capability, so I set it up in hopes of finding the solution to the mystery, but.... nada, nothing, no varmints.  A few curious birds seemed interested in the new shiny thing, and a few California Ground Squirrels visited the fountain for water, but nothing else.  We knew that the infrared feature worked, because we used the camera to film a curious neighbor cat who was coming to the door to taunt our cats, but the camera picked up nothing in the back yard at night.

We had noticed that there were often large splashes of water outside the bottom basin that didn't seem to be accounted for by bird activity, so Cindy decided to unplug the fountain, let the water settle down and then plug it back in the other morning.  The result was a geyser that shot up into the air, splashing large quantities of water out over the side.

So now it looks like either there is something about the fountain as it is presently configured that makes the water shoot up like that.  We'll just have to figure out whether it's calcium deposits that have built up, or the way the rocks are arranged, or what it is that's causing this.

My favorite theory was the Raccoon bacchanalia, but that's not what the evidence showed.  It's something of a letdown--maybe, as Pogo says, "we have met the enemy and it is us."

   

Three Sisters Garden Experiment

This year Cindy decided to try a "Three Sisters" garden using a companion planting philosophy drawn from several different Native American cultures.  The three sisters are pole beans, squash and corn.  The beans contribute nitrogen to the soil, the corn provides an upright structure for the bean tendrils to climb, and the large leaves of the squash plants keep the roots of all the plants shaded and cool in the heat of summer.  https://www.groworganic.com/organic-gardening/articles/three-sisters-companion-planting-method

That's the theory, anyway.

It started well enough; Cindy was pleased that all the plants germinated.

Everything Came Up!

And they grew.

"The Corn Is As High..."

And they grew some more.

Corn Flower

The corn produced its flowers, and the beans produced, well, ... beans.  Lots of beans.  Lots and lots of beans.

Cindy And Our Friend Lisa With Beans.  Lots of Beans

It began to look a bit like a jungle in that raised bed.

We had some of the corn last night for dinner.  It was sweet, but not too sweet, and juicy.  I think Cindy was pleased with it--she grew up in Northern Indiana, and if there's one thing an Indiana girl knows, it's corn, although I hadn't realized that this was the first time she had ever actually grown corn.

Apparently the corn is pollinated by the wind, which needs to reach every kernel to fertilize it, so the wind must have done its job well.  The beans were clearly pretty happy with the arrangement, but I'm not sure if we got any squash.  The squash flowers are pollinated by bees, who carry pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers.  Unfortunately, that means that both the male and female flowers need to be open at the same time; since the flowers only last for one day, that means timing is everything, and if they don't get pollinated there's no fruit produced.  In this bed the plants were so dense that it was difficult to see if there were any flowers.

And now it's almost done for the season.

End of the Season

Corn Silk!

Good Snake/Bad Snake

People in our urban neighborhood have been finding snakes in their yards lately.  It's always a startling experience, and the question is:  is this a good (harmless) snake, or a bad (poisonous) snake?

Unfortunately, many people don't know how to tell the difference and react by killing beneficial snakes.

This is one of the good ones, either a Pacific Gopher Snake, Phouphis catenifer catenifer, or a San Diego Gopher Snake, Phouphis catenifer annectens:  Gopher Snake Identification.  We found him sunning himself on our garden wall a couple of months ago, so I was able to get a couple of good pictures, including ones of his head and neck and body pattern.

These snakes live on small rodents, such as rats, mice and ground squirrels, as well as lizards, birds and even other snakes.   When they feel threatened, Gopher Snakes may hiss and shake their tails, which may lead whatever is threatening the snake to assume it's a rattlesnake and leave it alone.  Unfortunately, many humans buy the deception and just kill it .

We recognized this one as a beneficial snake and just left him to go about his gopher and rat eradicating business.

And this is one of the dangerous ones, probably a Southern Pacific Rattlesnake, Crotalus oreganus helleri. 

The next door neighbor found this guy curled up under some leaves when she was cleaning up her yard.  It was chilly that day, so they were able to use a shovel to just pick him up, still coiled, and get him into the box.  They called Project Wildlife, which is now part of the San Diego Humane Society, who sent Animal Control officers out to collect the snake.  We had assumed that the snake was just a baby since it was pretty small, but the officers said that the number of rattles on its tail indicated that it was about one year old.  They said the snake would be released in an uninhabited area.

So how can you tell the difference between the beneficial snake and the dangerous one?  For one thing, the Gopher Snake has a slender, glossy body and a pointed tail with no rattles, while the rattlesnake's body is thicker, not glossy, and with a blunt tail ending in a series of rattles.  The Gopher Snake's head is only slightly larger than its neck, while the rattlesnake's neck is narrower and its head is triangular.

Here's a good comparison:

Nobody likes surprises, so it's best to stay alert, make some noise and let these guys get out of your way.