More Garden Destruction; The Culprit?

More and more of my beloved veggies have disappeared! The beans, sweet potatoes and cucumbers have lost ALL of their leaves. Tomatoes and zucchinis have been munched, along with all of the watermelons and cantaloupe. The only thing that hasn't been eaten is the squash from my last post!

I correctly blamed the melon destruction on the raccoons, but now I know that THIS is who ate the rest!

In this picture, he is eating clover but I can safely say that a groundhog's favorite food is anything from the vegetable garden! From the looks of the one we saw in our garden, they can get pretty fat on veggies!

This weekend we were making more salsa and needed a few more tomatoes to finish the batch. So my daughter and I walked up to the garden to pick some where we saw the fattest groundhog of all time finishing off the last of the bean leaves.

"Hey! What are you doing? Get out of here!" I yelled at him. He seemed to understand me perfectly and ran as fast as his little legs could take his big fat body in to the woods.

I don't usually talk to (or yell at) animals like this. Groundhogs are easy to talk to I guess. Now I understand the post that Kenny from Veggie Gardening Tips wrote about his groundhog. It is titled Conversations with a Woodchuck, and is one of the funniest bit of writing I've seen in a while.

Kenny caught his culprit. I hope I can do the same!

Super Hot Days Make for Beautiful Skies!

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A Foggy Forest - Natural Beauty!

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Spooky moon last night; beautiful sunrise this morning. Perfect for Wordless Wednesday!

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For Green Thumb Sunday: A Guinea Pig's Garden?

Green Thumb Sunday is about showcasing what you have growing in your gardens. Well this Green Thumb Sunday, I am being upstaged by Sammy, my daughters guinea pig. Everything I have planted outside in the garden has done poorly so far but Sammy seems to be a master gardener!

She has planted a nice garden in the corner of her cage.

I don't know how she did it, I guess she does have a green thumb. But wait, guinea pigs don't even have thumbs!

Seriously, we just notice those sprouts yesterday morning. Obviously she spilled some of the seeds from her food bowl and her water bottle dripped on them. She spends most days out of her cage playing with her guinea pig brother, Fizzy. That would explain how the seeds could have undisturbed time to germinate.

The sprouts must have been there for a couple of days without my family noticing. We all got a pretty good laugh when my daughter saw it and exclaimed that Sammy's garden is doing better than ours.

It's not good to be out done by a guinea pig. I hope I grow better tomatoes than she does!

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Our snowmen come in all shapes and sizes!

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Active Robins: A sign of spring?

Last evening I looked out the window and saw over thirty birds on my front yard.

Many birds in the yard is not that unusual. But when I looked closer, I could see that they were all Robins! Now that is a bit unusual. We usually only see a few at a time around here, and usually not this soon in the year.

Many people here say that when Robins appear in the yard it means that spring has just about arrived. I would like to think that to be true but as I write this it is 25 degrees outside. I wonder if these robins are just passing through. I have heard that the ones that do migrate travel in large groups like this one.

We have become particularly interested in robins since we had the nest in our peach tree, but I don't really know about their migration habits. I'd love to hear from some of you bird experts!

Do the robins know when warmer weather is coming?

I'm Hungry for Spring on Wordless Wednesday!

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A Nuthatch and Signs of Spring!

I know I said I was going to post about tips for making the garden better this year, but first I wanted to show the pictures my wife took yesterday in our back yard. She got some great photos of this nuthatch:

She had read that the nuthatches are the tamest, friendliest birds. She tested that theory by slowly getting real close to it. Our camera doesn't zoom very far so it is hard to tell from the photos how close she is, but look at this next picture and notice that the nuthatch is looking at the camera without flying away!

The only other bird that even attempted to come to the feeder while she was there was this little Tufted Titmouse, but I think he is our little "cat food friend" that I posted about before!

If you scroll back up to the picture of the nuthatch running down the tree, you'll notice that the titmouse is there too, over to the right!

While outside yesterday, my wife and kids noticed many other signs of spring. We are all happy to see that many perennials were coming up under all of that snow we had.

Some of our Irises!

A Hyacinth!

It is a beautiful sunny day here again today, and almost all of the snow has melted and caused a bit of flooding. Look at the standing water in our yard!

The grass is actually looking green already. I am so happy to see the snow gone. I'm not so sure that my children want the snow to be gone. They still played in the tiny bit of snow that was left.

He may be only half a foot tall, but he's pretty cute! I hope he's the last snowman of the season.

Happy pre-spring!

My First Green Thumb Sunday

This is my first official Green Thumb Sunday post, and I am excited to finally be a part of it. When the weather is nice and I'm not gardening, I like to do other things outdoors like fishing out on the lake!

Since there isn't much going on in the garden right now, I went back to last summer looking for some good garden pictures to post. The more I looked at those pictures of my sunny and warm garden, the more I longed for this coming season. It finally got to where I didn't want to look at the garden pictures anymore, so I settled on these lake sunset pictures.

But since Green Thumb Sunday really ought to have a garden theme, here is another silhouette picture from the garden:

Can you believe that is a hornet visiting our butterfly bush? I was trying to take an actual color picture of him, but none of them were very good. So even though the above picture was an accident, it is one of my favorites of my insect photos!

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Dangerous Ice but Beauty in the Garden!

We have had a lot of freezing rain and everything is covered in ice. Many people stress out in times like these, but I like to look for the beauty in it instead.

Sure you have to be extra careful when driving, and be prepared for a power outage, but isn't it amazing how the water can freeze instantly as it is dripping off of the trees?

If you want to see even more of nature's beauty in the ice, you have to head out to the garden and focus on smaller things like this ornamental grass.

But you can't even stop here. You have to get closer still.

The droplets are solid yet liquid, random yet uniform, still and yet full of motion.

God is so big and yet he seems to delight in creating beauty even in the so small.

Yesterday was difficult traveling in the ice and snow, but as everyone around me on the highway and at work were grumpy and upset about the weather, I was able to remain focused on the fact that it is all from God and it is all beautiful.

Even still, I hope this morning's commute is a little less treacherous!

Black Widow and Square Foot Gardening!

I am currently reading Mel Bartholemew's "All New Square Foot Gardening" book and it is just as good as his original Square Foot Gardening book from many years ago. Here is a picture of the two covers:

Notice that among other things, he has chaged the way he lays out his squares. In the old days he just layed down wide boards to walk on in between his garden squares. Now he builds raised bed squares and spaces them farther apart with grass growing in between them.

Well Mel, I can give testimony as to one reason that is a better idea. Last season, I layed down planks in between my different kinds of beans like that to walk on. This fall when we cleaned up the garden I turned over the plank and guess what I found living under there? I found ants, worms, slugs and THIS:

Isn't that a great Happy Valentines Day for you! I'm pretty sure that is a black widow spider! Of course I did not get to see its belly to check for the diamond pattern.

What do you think? If anyone reading this agrees that it is a Black Widow, please comment. If I'm wrong, then tell me what kind of spider it is. Here are a couple more pictures of it:

I have video of it as well, but I couldn't figure out how to get it embedded in this blog. (If anyone knows how to to that, I would appreciate some pointers)

So anyway, this season I will have to think twice about using boards to walk on since it provides great cover for such creepy spiders! I don't like Black Widows living in my garden!

On the plus side, it sure makes for a great addition to my close-up bug photo collection! :)