Gardening | Life of Pat and Nat

The last of our driftwood from last spring’s rains

I had other things to do including replacing the cable on my dock so I figured I’d burn the wood. I’ve noticed that the water level is starting to come up.

Just go ahead and smile

Our bird feeders are filled with nothing but black oil sunflower seeds. Turns out those seeds are very viable and the ones that the birds drop and lose grow quite well. This spring/summer has been incredibly wet. We’re closing in on 20″ above normal for the year.

We didn’t plant any of these.

Biltmore

Nat and I visited the Biltmore as part of the BMW RA rally there. We even managed to carry Sammie along.

The pool has been filled in to restore things to original.

It was fun looking for critters in the garden pools.

This is Nat taking pictures on the roof of the Biltmore during the Architect’s tour.

Flowers blooming

With all Nat’s care and lots of rain the gardens are doing great.

Including the mystery flower.

And lots of sunflowers from feeding birds.

Another day another raccoon

For the third day in a row we woke to a raccoon in the trap. Too bad we have to return the borrowed trap. There may well be more of them that run in a pack.

Also again we saved a box turtle. Two in fact. We have them in a box to show the kids before we place them into a garden to feast on worms and such.

These two have the most head markings of the four we’ve just caught.

Nature Day

The day started with a raccoon in the trap so I put it in the truck to relocate. On the way out of the neighborhood we found this.

We picked him up from the middle of the road to take home for our back yard. While putting him by the lake in the woods we spotted this.

After cleaning up some debris along the lake and seeing a skink too quick for a picture I spotted this in the garden where Nat was working.

Later I expect to spot a couple of rugrats.

For The Birds

We put up a purple martin house and fairly quickly got some residents. They work hard at making their nests and we’ve witnessed purple martin porn so we know they’re getting ready to have broods. The trouble is European starlings show up and tear out the nests and harass the martins. We looked it up and see that the starlings will kill the baby birds, they’ll kill the adults if they can trap them in the box, and they’ll peck the eggs if they find those. Oh and to discourage the martins in the first place they tear the nests apart and chase them around. So following what we found on the internet we’re preparing a little surprise for them.

Here’s the parts