Natures Woes….

Such an upsetting week as far as nature is concerned….

1. Field mice invading the house in spite large black racer snake that has been coiled around our recycle bin for several days. Annoyed because I have to deal with mouse myself, as man about the place is on vacation.

2. Large black snake disappears… only to be found by youngest in the nest box of our one chicken that had gone broody. And of course youngest had counted his chickens before they hatched.. as did mama… we had our hopes up high for fluffy peeping balls. Again, as above, I was left to deal with this on my own. I warned youngest not to worry if there was lots of screaming as I wrangled it out of the box with our snake pole (yes, we have a bonified snake pole).. I said there would definitely be screaming, and that if mama ran, he should run too. Screaming and wrangling commenced, but snake was removed from nest box… he had consumed all but one of the eggs, and that one the mama chicken abandoned. Snake returned next day, for second course. At this point I am tired of living in the country, and want to find a big city flat instead. This time, we called in grandpa from next door. He managed to wrangle snake without screaming, and got him into a large bucket. He planned to take him to a new home in some uninhabited woods miles from our house.

3) Went to work on weedy gardens, only to discover, smaller, but still biggish, black racer snake. With all this snakeage, how can there be any field mice left?

4) Shredded hands to ribbons and destroyed all fingernails trying to get wire grass out of garden bed. However, managed to turn this, into this:

A large pile of weeds…. some new flowers and boom:

You can see the back half still needs some work…. waiting for rain to calm down… and the lawn needs mowing and edging, but the youngest and I will wait for the menfolk to come do that. Needless to say, the ant bites from lifting the rocks and pulling the weeds out from underneath are smarting quite a bit. At one point I sat on a nest, and before I knew it, they were biting me from neck to bum.

5) Ants are everywhere this summer.. never in all my life here (12 years) have I so much as seen a mound or had ants in the house. But they have begun marching. I spent a couple of days trying to vacuum them up as they came  in the door. But now they have found the kitchen. So I have dusted the kitchen with pepper and cinnamon (frugal, green methods of ant control worth trying).. and mixed borax and sugar into a past and put it in their path outside the door (frugal, but poisonous). So far, the pepper/cinnamon seems to be helping.. not so sure of the borax.

6) In trying to ascertain where the ants were coming in, I missed a step at our back door… You see, I went out the door, foot on first step, turned to look back at the door to see where ants were getting in, and missed the middle step… and I fell on the concrete steps, twisting ankle and wrist and scraping skin off top of foot. Not to mention feeling the fool, even though the duck is the only one to “know”. There was no bruising or swelling of foot, so I guess I really did not twist it.. but if I have to put weight on it, such as going up and down stairs, or tiptoeing to reach something, it caves in!  I would think I would be in pain if something had snapped or broken… but nothing external to be seen or felt.

7) SO reaching upon tip toes to get the willow branches I need is out of the question.. at least until this weekend when there will be people around to help should I need it. Every time I have tried it, the foot just caves. So our wattle fences are 3/4 done.

This is the fence for my middle sons water garden.. the chickens and duck have made real nuisances of themselves with the new plantings. SO we are trying this.. so far, seems okay.

And it does not detract from the overall effect.

The fence around the herb garden is looking like this:

It might be a bit hard to see, but I think it will work when it is done. We still need to push down the wattles in places, as well as finish the full circle. Those ants have a lot to answer for.

8. And just when I think we have been through all the plagues possible, I discover my perfect Swiss chard, which I was saving to harvest Sat when the gang is all here again….. overnight looks like this:

Groundhogs may be cute, but this does not make us friends. We cornered one in the garden a couple of weeks ago… me and the 2 youngest staring him down. We shooed him out of the garden, and to see that fat little body fly suggested he had learned his lesson. How he gets in, I do not know. The garden is fenced.. and he is toooooo fat to climb. We have tied things to the fence to blow in the wind, because movement will scare them. Grrr…. we better not meet up face to face.

Although I have my suspicions that middle son is paying him under the table to do the dirty work…

9) At least we are getting rain. Which is why my kitchen/dining ceilings now sport some new dark patches… cannot wait to show those to the hubbler when he gets home.

I have had a lot of bad nature karma this week, and I do not know why. But I am soooo over it.