Blog Slacker

What I feared would happen when I jumped into the blog pond has happened. I have become a blog slacker. I have been nudged twice this week about it, so here goes. My reason for not posting is that there was just not much going on.

I have been working hard at getting ready to leave home for awhile. It finally got dry and hot enough that I was able to get all of the grass mowed at one time. In fact, it was so dry by the time I finished that I was so covered with dust each time I got off the mower I had to hose myself down before entering the house. The last three days I have been working on setting up the automatic watering system I built last year for my container plants. I cobbled it together from parts I found at the big box stores and the irrigation supply in hopes that I could keep stuff alive while we traveled to Canada last July. It worked out very well, and I used it most of the rest of the summer when I went away for a few days, or when I would just get so busy I couldn’t maintain the hand watering on schedule. It is very important when temperatures reach the 90’s that plants in containers be watered every day, and at the same time of day. The pots need to be flooded with water, not sprayed at. It takes time and care to do it right, but the reward is fabulous plants.

On the wildlife front, I have seen some neat things, including more turtles going to and fro across the yard to lay eggs and returning to the pond. I have seen the juvenile red-tailed hawk out in the meadow near the old log cabin site. It is as big as an adult, and I have seen it hunting in the grass out there a couple of times. One time it caught a big green grasshopper, and then didn’t seem to know what to do with it. It is not cut out to run, but it did sort of lumber across the grass in search of something else it saw moving. It is too far away to get a picture, but the action is way better than a picture would be.

We discovered we have a young speckled king snake living in the garage area. He was living inside a roll of plastic I had in front of the garage. He was pretty confused there after I unrolled it to get him out and then put it away. He crawled off into the garage and I haven’t seen him since. He had been hanging around the bottom of the big pine tree by my shop door, and I had seen him crawling around in some of the nursery stock plants near the garage. We are hoping he hangs around. Copperheads are what I usually see out there, so I am always scanning the ground in that area. I have also seen an enormous rat snake out there this year.

My husband reported seen some strange ducks in irrigation puddles beside a corn field he passes frequently. I rode with him one day with the camera and got some pictures. They turned out to be Black-bellied Whistling ducks. Once only known from south of the border and occasionally in South Texas, they are moving north in a hurry. They are cavity nesters like wood ducks, and have already been observed using wood duck boxes south of Collinston after the wood ducks had hatched. Terry had been seeing 4-6 ducks at a time. A friend of ours who is doing bird surveys for a bird atlas project checked out the area about the time a crop duster flew over. She counted a total of 17 once they started flushing out of the corn field.