Blossoms and Snakes

It is that time of year! I so love spring! The warmth in the air feels so fresh and invigorating. And to see all the little green buds and sprouts poking through everywhere. I love everything about it. Last Saturday, I ran outside quickly to take a few pics of the blossoms before they're gone.

They're everywhere! Layers and layers of them on our old orchard trees. So beautiful!

As I was basking in the beauty, things took a real bad turn. Real. Bad. I mean polar opposite of sweet lovely blossoms. I had my first snake sighting in the yard. I always scoff when people say, "Oh, it's far too early for the snakes to be out yet". Right. This guy was a couple of feet away from where I was standing, and he didn't care a bit that I was there.

I quickly backed away, and sent this text to Bob (who was in the house at the time)...

He came out in a jiffy and dispatched the snake for me. 

At least we're one down for the year. I'm hoping to eradicate, but even as I do, our neighbors continue to make their yard a very snake-friendly yard. I think it may be hopeless.

Early Fall Ramblings

I still can't quite believe summer is over and we're well into fall. How does time seem to fly by faster and faster with each passing year? I can honestly say I feel like we packed about as much as we possibly could into summer, though, so I don't have any regrets. Just trying to keep up, though, kept us hopping. I think we both lost weight over the summer, because we just didn't have time to eat a regular meal on some of those busy days. I love looking back at the photos, and thinking about the treasured family time we had.

And it seems we're just as busy now that it's fall!

How can you not smile with so many babies around. This photo was taken after our family pics a few weeks ago, so the kiddos were tired out, but still as sweet as can be. We can't get enough of them. Arms full of babies... what can be better?

The surroundings up at the cabin are gorgeous and fall-ish. We did our annual maple leaf cuttings, and brought them home to decorate with. (By "we", I mean Bob, with me pointing out just the perfect colored leaves to cut).

There is always wildlife to be seen at or around the cabin. This porcupine was just a few feet away from us, and didn't seem to mind that we were there at all.

Lots of family dinners. This picture is totally representative of what they're like. Babies everywhere in high chairs and walkers and laps.

What you don't see in the photo above, is to the left of that picture is the kid's table, which Grandpa was at, helping to get food down the older grands.

We had the perfect amount of apple-pears this year. There was a bit of a freeze in the late spring, which thinned out the harvest quite a bit. Towards the end, we just picked all of the remaining apple-pears and boxed them. We delivered them all around, and ate plenty!

A perfect specimen. (That goes for the hand holding the apple-pear as well as the apple-pear itself)

Of course pumpkin harvesting had to happen so that we could set the pumpkins out on the porch to decorate. The grand kids helped harvest the small crop that we had this year.

Such perfect times. I can't imagine not having photos to remind us of the sweet, happy moments in life. They have a way of slipping away from the forefront of our memory if we don't have the photos to look back on. Or is that just me?

Snakes... A Never Ending Supply

We've got a situation again around here. Snakes. We "got rid of" 7 last year, so my hopes were that the word would get around, and we wouldn't have a real snake problem this year. Alas, no. The fourth one for the year met it's demise on Tuesday, and it was the longest one so far.

I see a snake at least 3 times a week. I always tell myself that it's the same snake, but way inside I know better...

With all the sightings I have, you'd think it would become common and lose its fearfulness. Nope. Not at all. 

This one below was a classic catch. Bob was on the phone with an important call that he had to take while we were out in the backyard. I was walking through the yard, and said, "Snake!", and without a break in his conversation, he stepped on the tail of the snake and picked it up and held it there by the tail until he could get off the phone. The person he was talking to was none the wiser.

And then there are things like this that give me just as much of the heebie-jeebies. A snake skin. A pretty long snake skin. Which means that a good-sized snake was growing even bigger and had to shed his skin. And I love how it came off as he was crawling down into a whole. Ick.

Bob's second catch of the season. Can I describe how much I love this man o' my dreams, who gets how much I fear snakes? He never seems to tire of coming to my rescue!

How does a son-in-law earn his mother-in-law's eternal gratitude? By coming to her rescue and getting a whopper of a snake. I will ever be thankful for this man!

All of this leads us to this package from Amazon. I can't tell you if any of it works, but I certainly am going to give it all a whirl. It's either that, or put cement across my whole yard, which I've contemplated. 

I'll let you know how things go.

The End of An Era: Wisteria Removal

This has been a year of simplifying in our yard. And let me be clear -- simplifying is hard work. Sounds like an oxymoron of some sort, but it's true. We're on our second dumpster for the year, which would make it sound like we have a lot of junk in our yard. And that's not really the case. We're just working on making things a little less maintenance-heavy in our yard. We have a dumpster in our front yard for a week, and we're doing our best to do all of the dumpster-worthy projects while it's here.

On Monday we took down our backyard wisteria. It's that awesome vine growing all along our deck railing. It's been growing for 14 years!

Don't get me wrong. I love wisteria, and I loved that vine. The thing I didn't love was that as the years went on, it took more and more work.

It would get very, very unwieldy with it's branches growing out, and to keep it tidy up on the deck, I had to trim it up every week during the growing season of summer. And if I didn't, it's tentacles would almost reach out and grab people as they walked by. I'm not kidding about that.

I loved the sweet view it gave from the bottom patio. Everything was framed in leaves. To think... that whole railing around the top deck was covered with leaves and branches from the single trunk below.

The real clincher was that every other day, our patio needed sweeping because of all of the leaves it tends to drop. And who has time for that? Especially with 7 grand babies to snuggle and play with. Nope. I don't want to have extra chores that take my precious time.

So... Monday night, when Bob came home from work, we started on one end, and went to town.

I loved being able to see the backyard as we got going. I had missed being able to see that when I was in the kitchen, or anywhere on the main floor, for that matter. In the picture below, we had cut up to the point you see, and if you look carefully, you can see the tentacles of the wisteria that were reaching out and needing to be cut back.

Now, a wisteria that has grown for that many years is liable to get itself wrapped around things pretty tightly.

It took some doing to remove the old big vines from their grasp.

But after about two hours time, we had it all down! If you look closely at the photo below, you can still see the stump in front of the middle brick post. We'll get that taken care of this weekend.

Well, we almost have it all down. There is one "hanger-on-er" that is going to take some work. This guy actually bent the rod iron that it was attached to. I'm tempted to leave it there as a conversation piece.

I'm totally happy with the results. I love being able to see everything in the backyard now, from the house. I am going to love a little less maintenance in our yard. 

Funny thing is, our front yard wisteria has these beautiful blooms right now, which is totally off-season. This generally happens in the early spring. It's almost as if it's saying, "Look how pretty I am. You would never want to cut me down, right?". And it would be right. So far, the front yard wisteria is much more manageable and we keep it contained to a smaller area. I don't really have to do much with it more than once or twice a year. Easy enough. For now.

S-SOS (Second Snake of the Season)

Oh boy. I knew it was a probability, but still. We're already at Snake #2 of the season. And Bob has dispatched both of them for me, which saves me the bounty I normally pay per snake. Kindof.

I am slowly trying to make my yard more unattractive to reptiles, while still trying to keep it attractive to humans. It's a bit tricky, actually. But we're working on it. And in the mean time, my love continues to come to my rescue, literally. He doesn't give up easily, either.

He's so determined to get rid of the little beasts and make my life a bit more worry-free. He even bought a snake grabber. Okay, maybe it's really a garbage picker, but he bought it specifically to grab snakes with, and it works like a charm, as attested by the photo below.

Icky. The only thing good about this photo is that I know I'll never see that snake again. 

So, if you find yourself with a snake situation, run to Home Depot and pick yourself up a snake grabber. Maybe don't ask the workers for a snake grabber. Ask for a garbage picker, and know that you and a few others know the real use for that contraption.

The Year of the Iris

I'm going to go ahead and declare this the year of the iris. At least in my yard. I am pretty sure I had iris bloom in colors I didn't even know I had. It must have something to do with the cool, extraordinary spring we've been having. At any rate, they sure put on a show...

I love the variegated foliage on this one below. So pretty, and adds interest to the garden long after the blooms have gone away.

So many of these are from my mom's garden. As I was trying to fill up my garden, she would dig up shovelfuls of iris rhizomes in her yard, and I'd run them to my garden and put them in the ground.

Look at the colors in this one. What a beauty!

The bonus to irises is that they are sooooo easy to grow and care for. They don't take much of anything, except perhaps dividing once in a while. Pretty, pretty, old-fashioned flowers that remind me of my mom. Love them!

Garden Perrenials Save the Day

This is one of those years. I usually have bought most or all of my annuals, along with some new perennials by now. In a normal year, I would have perused the nurseries many times over, and picked up a few loads. But this year, it hasn't happened yet. For one thing, we had lots and lots of cold rain in May. So much so, that strolling through the nurseries didn't sound fun, let alone working out in the yard. 

So, I still have that on my list, and I definitely will get some more things to stick in the ground. 

But in the meantime... those beautiful perennials that muscle through the long, snowy winter months, and endure severe pruning, and look like little mounds of nothing in the early spring -- those stalwart gems of the flower beds -- have saved my garden this year.

Oh, the peonies. How I love peonies. I wish they bloomed all year long.

Bees are buzzing around this salvia. Must be full of nectar. 

The weather has been so strange this year, that the picture below actually looks like my August gardens. I'm sure in a couple of weeks, I'll be pulling out and cleaning up, but for now... 

And the snapdragons have all come back up, and are gorgeous. More gorgeous than last year, for sure. I love snapdragons. They remind me of my mom's and grandma's gardens.

Perennial Geranium. The perfect plant for this spot. It slowly ambles and becomes a bit bigger through the years, but it is easy to pull back, or to divide and replant here and there (thanks, Mom!).