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Creatures of the dark

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RaccoonMeet my little friend – isn’t he cute?

Right, uh huh …

It seems that this little creature – or one just like him, and I are destined to meet.

I tend to water in the evenings. Yes I know that isn’t always the best thing for garden plants but I really have had few problems develop by doing so. I water in the evening because I live next to two older ladies, uh, elderly ladies and they each come outside and water twice a day.

One in particular tends to follow me around, or worse she waits until I’m as far away from her as I can possibly be, and then she asks me a question or comments on the weather or some such thing.

“Huh, what? I can’t hear you?”

So I stop what I’m doing and walk over to where she is – usually on her porch – and get her to repeat whatever she had said. After a short conversation I try to get back to work, only to be interrupted several times. What should be a half hour job turns into a two hour job because of these ladies and other adjoining neighbors.

Having explained the background, hopefully you can see why I’ve taken to watering in the late evening, and even after dark?

My garden is small, but it’s full of plants, and as a result it can take more than two hours to water it adequately if I only water every second or third day. Most of the plants are in the backyard, therefore most of my time is spent in the back, in the semi-dark, and with the possibility of meeting up with Mr. and or Mrs. Raccoon. Oh and their kids too!

And that is what has been happening lately!

We have a raccoon that seems to think that the backyard is his or hers. It hangs out on the fence between our house and our other neighbors and watches me in the yard. I’m not all that happy with this situation. It’s not always there … sometimes it shows up after I’ve been watering for a while, like last night.

tea-party7 I heard scritch scritch scritch and looked over, and there on top of my neighbors covered patio was the raccoon. He or she was just about to climb onto my fence, and from there who knows where it would have gone. I turned quickly, hose in hand and dialed the nozzle to Jet and sent a stream flying at him! You should have seen him run!

Victory was mine! I felt like one of Charlies Angels with that move. My trusty water hose and nozzle saved the day.

Naturally after that adrenaline rush I was nervous. So much for my victory. It might come back!

So what did I do? No I didn’t stop watering. My garden was thirsty, but I do have to say, it probably didn’t get as much as it would have had the raccoon not made my heart pitter patter. I stood in my yard near the patio, not too far from the porch and safety inside the enclosed back room, and watered from there. I put the hose on a strong but wide stream and hit all the plants in the back corners and back borders. The plants closer to me got a little more accurate watering.

So how do I get the raccoons to stop hanging out in my yard? It’s not like there’s any garbage that they can get into in the back. They dig in a few of my plants now and then but otherwise don’t really cause any damage. Not so bad really … it’s just that I like being outdoors around the same time that they seem to come out and I don’t like meeting them face to face.

They’ve never been around this much. Before they used to just walk through our yard and move onto one of our neighbors yards – used ours like a freeway I guess. But I’ve been sick this year and haven’t been out as much – especially after dark, so I think this has given them a chance to stop and look around and say “Hey, this is a nice place to hang out”.

What’s your thoughts on raccoons hanging out in the backyard? Should I just stop going out there after dark and let them win? Unfortunately, that would mean braving my neighbors attention and everything taking two or three times longer than it should take to get done. Nope … I gotta figure out a way to scare the pesky raccoons away, because my neighbors are worse! Help!






2006 garden winter protection

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I haven’t really begun to work on this site. I had planned to write in it daily and I do still plan to do that, but I’ve been busy with securing the domain name that this site will be placed under and I’m still looking for a good theme that I can convert into a wonderful garden layout.

It’s been cool this week so I haven’t been doing much with the garden. After last weeks blast of heat, then rain and now the slightly cool weather the garden has really taken off.

Actually since we had a very mild winter with very little damage to the plants I’d say that the garden is about a month ahead of itself. Many of the roses are already 6 or 7 feet tall. I’m used to having to prune many of the winter damaged branches down to one or two foot stubs but I didn’t have to do that this year.

Ironically, this past winter we winter protected better than we ever had before. We gathered leaves from our neighbors as we usually do but this year we must have gathered twice as many as we normally do – perhaps 50 bags of leaves! The garden beds had an approximately 3 foot cover of leaves on them. On top of that we had mounded soil around the base of the roses as usual, and we put up a long burlap fence that surrounds the garden beds on either side. Overkill even in a very cold winter.

When we uncovered everything in the spring the strawberry plants were already green, the rose branches were tall, green and only a few had slight damage. The rest of the plants were doing well too. It was amazing!

Well I must go and see if I can muster up some energy to get into the garden and do some work or else keep working on finding a nice theme for this site.

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