May/June update

A word about the “fake prairie life".  There are blogs about "prairie life" that include dressing up fancy and pushing products on the net.  THAT IS NOT PRAIRIE LIFE.  That’s downtown Denver life.  Believing this fantasy land can lead people to think moving to the prairie is romantic.  Suddenly, the kid is bitten by a rattlesnake, the dog attacked and killed by an eagle, and the home flooded in a hail storm and electricity is out for two weeks.  Assuming one is still there when winter hits, it's 10 feet of snow and 60 mph winds.  The lie of the prairie romance is exposed.   I find all of this type of “make-believe” harmful to the world, creating a false story that people fall for and can end up dead from.  I realize that fiction is the new “reality”, but I have to mention that reality still exists even if you think you can ignore it.

Speaking of rattlesnakes, I came out of my garage and found this on laying along the path to the house.  I fetched the snake hook, a cooler and the snake is now in the taped shut cooler in the shade to be released after my hubby comes home.  We usually look for an open place to release these, though the wiping out of ranches means there are fewer and fewer places the snake can actually live.  (For those of you who hate rattlesnakes, all I can say is "haunta virus".  You kill the predators that keep the vermin in check, you get more vermin.)

A couple of days later while mowing I went over the top of a baby rattlesnake, about the size of a pencil.  I couldn't catch him and he slithered out of the yard.  About 4 days later we found him again out in the windbreak.  Again, couldn't catch him.  So now I do yard work with leather gloves on!

Speaking of vermin, I now live between two rural ghetto junkyards:

These are vermin haven.  The bunnies like it too, but I worry that the number of mice breeding is huge.  The county doesn't care in the least.  You can have 100 dead cars and other junk and nothing is done.  Now, for the lowlifes who want to live in garbage, that's great.  However, I caution you if you want to move to Wyoming that you may be living next to garbage dumps.  

There is an up side to this.  I was going to paint my house all one color and make it look nice.  However, since I live between garbage heaps, I'm sticking with the calico motif and painting the walls, trim and skirting whatever colors I have.  Actually, I kind of like the quirky look and since my neighbors have made it clear that there is no reason to care what your lot and house look like, I plan on going with the idea.  Plus, adding some colorful "garden tool statues" (really recycled tools welded together and called "art"), probably a few other cute artsy things in really hideous colors, etc.  It's quite freeing to live where there are zero standards. 

The good news is the really ugly, rotting trailers up the road (that we drive by daily) are being torn out.  I guess the owner finally sold them and maybe the new owner will actually care about having a decent subdivision.  Maybe….. These are the remaining blights, and the demolition of other trailers.

This one is torn down now

Now, just some pictures.

Kingbird

Pincushion cactus blooming

Prickly pear cactus about to bloom—looks like a face!

Locust tree in bloom

Iris in bloom

Summer's here

Okay, time for cute pictures of the dog.  As you can see, she sleeps a lot (she's asleep right now in the chair beside me).  When not asleep, she enjoys chewing on empty soda bottles.  As you can tell, the dog has TEETH!  Yorkies have remarkably large teeth for their size!

This spring we had a couple of heavy rains and flooding.  This was followed by almost no rain in July.  It's been hot—today it's 93 degrees.  So far the evaporative cooler has been able to keep up most days.  We do have a window air conditioner in case the swamp cooler malfunctions or can't keep up, but other than when the pump basket clogged off (that happens from time to time) and when it was hot day after day and I had to close the curtains and hang blankets for a couple of days, we've been okay with the cooler.

My garden is hanging in there, in spite of the heat.  Earwigs are another story.  Looks like I'm going to have to powder the corn and so forth if I want to kill them.  I've drown tons of them by putting down wet sheets at night and then throwing the sheets into a bucket of soapy water, but I can't kill enough to make a dent, it seems.  I've gotten peas, the beans are almost ready and the tomatoes have tiny tomatoes forming.  I also say a small zuchinni.  I can't eat fried zuchinni yet because I have no bottom teeth, but it's good for other dishes.

The ducks hatched a couple of batches of ducklings.  "Mama" hatched three babies around June 7th, then "Broody" hatched ten on the 26th of July.  All three of Mama's are alive and one, the drake, is larger than she is now!  So far, six of the ten Boody had are still alive.  I added shade, a shallow water  dish and a food dish to see if that helps keep the remaining six alive.  It has been so very hot for the ducks.  Broody is often seen panting and the babies spend much of day inside their house.  We let some ducks out one day and others the next.  Otherwise, they tend to fight each other.  We now have one duck per cage, except the mature drake and one hen are housed together.  This is much easier than trying to keep all six together.  When the hens go broody, fights erupt often and I was tired of fighting ducks.  So, they have their own little "happy places" and harmony rules!

These are two of the nighthawks that fly around during the day eating mosquitoes and other insects.  There are five altogether.  They do a good job of keeping the flying insect population down and they're fun to watch!  

That's it for this post.  More later.

Happy Holidays to all

I see I have not updated this blog for quite some time.  Apologies.

Garden season is over now—it's cold and windy.  My garden did well, in spite of a slow start.  My carrots and beets were huge, and the zucchinis very prolific.  In August, there was a frost that killed half the zucchinis and damaged the pumpkin vine and tomatoes.  I trimmed the plants back and warm weather returned, with the plants recovering.

huge beets

frozen pumpkin vine

Huge carrots and 9 lb zucchinni

huge oddly shaped carrots

Sasha is growing some.  She still only weighs about 3 lbs but she's a bit larger in size.  For a tiny dog, she's very tough.  We found she does NOT like snow.  First snow, when we opened the door to let her out, she started at the snow and then ran and hid.  Finally got her out for a bit and she chased some snowflakes.  After that, any time it snows, we pick her up and put her outside.  She's very fast, however, and has been very successful at doubling back and getting back in the house!  Yorkies are surprisingly quick.  She's caught flies and killed them!

Sasha being feisty

Sasha chasing snowflakes

The great horned owl returned for a bit.  While he was interesting in the past, the ducks are now living in the garden and I was worried he'd go after the ducks.  We tried putting them in their pens and/or the greenhouse, but that was not working, so they are back in the garden.  In the greenhouse, Baby has to be separated from the others.  Baby was the duckling I found fallen over in the mud and brought in the house.  Against all odds, she lived, but does not know how to be a duck very well.  Baby does not really get along with the other ducks.  In the garden, it's not a problem since there's plenty of room for all seven of the ducks.























I'm throwing in a picture of fall colors and of the deer in the yard.  The deer are here often and raining down destruction on my trees.  I didn't get time to prune the bottom of the Russian olive trees, which is just as well, since they ate all the leaves off the new shoots.  I would have wasted my time!

Time flies when you're having fun!

It's been a long time since I updated here.  Summer has ended, fall is past and winter is upon us.

This year we had a yellow-headed blackbird stopping by our yard.  I cannot remember having seen one in the past, nor had I seen the juncos that were here earlier in any other year.  It may have to do with our feeders actually being full this spring!  I also found a camel spider in the house again--I rarely find these bugs inside or out.  

Camel spider

yellow-headed blackbird

The small garden area did well, probably due to the increase in precipitation this year.  We had far more rain than last year and it seemed to make a difference.  We had a large crop of zucchini, two spaghetti squash, lots of lemon cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, beets and a few carrots (the carrots didn't come up very well).  I had allowed the cucumbers and squash to "climb" the chicken wire fences--with some interesting outcomes!

zucchini plants

tomatoes in greenhouse

Vegetable squash growing in fence

Lemon cucumber growing in fence

October 4th marked the end of summer/fall with a heavy, wet snowfall of 18 inches.  Trees came down all over the city and county, leaving the landscape strewn with limbs.  Two month later, the county and city are still trying to get to all the downed limbs on city property, while homeowners wait for tree services to get to their name on the list.  We lost only 3 large branches, but we did go our and knock the snow off the branches to help avoid losing limbs.  The duck pen, with it's chicken wire and snow fence cover, collapsed on the south side.  The ducks were fine--they were a bit confused as to what happened, but they had apparently been in their house at the time of the collapse.  We dug out the snow and pulled the sides back up, but it will require repair before spring and new ducklings are brought in.

Can you find the ducks?

Heavy, wet snow and bending trees

Duck pen before collapse

Sagebrush being weighed down

Very bad for fence

Ice storm a couple of weeks later

Ice storm

Trees down

We ended up with two female ducks which started laying eggs in August.  They were quite prolific layers--up to 5 eggs per day!  I ended up freezing many of the eggs because I just could not use them fast enough.  Since the females were such good layers, we opted to find someone to take the ducks, rather than butcher them.  I plan on going with Pekin ducks again next year.  These were funny to watch and did not follow me around endlessly as did the Rouens we had last year.  Pekins grow very quickly and could go outside quicker than the Rouens.  The one downside was the Pekins seemed messier.  They went everywhere around the yard together--so funny to see them waddling all over the place.  They travelled much more of the five acres than did the ducks last year.  

"Aflac" duck!

Oh, that feels sooo good!

"Headless duck"

ducks in a row!

We did not get any deer this year in hunting season.  The one night they were in the yard was the night the duck pen collapsed.  We had not seen much of them anyway--I think because it rained, there was more natural food and they stayed away.  We still them out on the prairies near the house, but had not seen any in the yard until recently.  The are mostly nocturnal at this point.  The weather is getting colder, so I expect to see more of them come in as winter progresses.

Two point buck, barely

Can you locate the deer?

Stopping for brunch