miscellanea

Some of you may remember I bought this little peach tree years ago, at least 5, maybe 6. When I planted it I decided I had sunk it too low and instead of digging it out and lifting it I just pulled up on the trunk and heard a distinctive pop. Well, fuck, I snapped the root. I expected it to die but it didn't, neither did it grow. For the next three years In the fall it put out a meager few new leaves and one or two blooms. Then last year in the spring it started to really grow and bloomed but none of the little fruits survived. It grew even more during the summer and this year it bloomed in the spring and put on new growth again and has given me two nice sized peaches! Maybe I'll have a peach tree after all.

I guess it had been a while since Minnie and I walked this way. This poor snake didn't make it across the road and now it's skeleton is embedded in the tar and gravel of the road surface.

Two of the 12 butternuts growing on the vines in the compost pile. Two more little fruits had open flowers on them.

Baby toads still scatter with every step. This one's a little bigger, not quite an inch.

The recent broken limb seems content to not die as it's not completely broken off and since it has developing pecans on it I'm curious to see if they will continue to grow or fall off as the summer progresses. At any rate, a dead limb is much easier to cut up than a living one so it can stay for the time being.

A couple of weeks ago I pulled out the bottom compartment on the stove to see a little mouse jump out and scurry off behind the stove. Oh great. Obviously it has been mice that knock my little bird skulls around and push things off the shelf above the kitchen sink. I have in the past tried live traps and never once been able to catch a single mouse even though they set the trap off and normally I don't kill things just because I can or because they are annoying me but I have to be able to catch them to release them and there are things I do not tolerate in the house, like mice. And so I bought a package of traps which I prefer over sticky pads, which are cruel as the mice will chew their own feet off to escape, and poison, also a cruel death. If I have to kill the mouse to get it out of the house I want it fast and as painless as possible. So I loaded two traps with peanut butter, put one next to the stove and one under the buffet. The first night, neither trap set off but all the peanut butter had been licked clean. Drat. So the next night I crammed a piece of pecan into the part that holds the bait and the next morning one of the traps had caught it's prey. Since there is never just one mouse I left the other trap in place and a few days later caught another. I've set a third trap by the stove in case there's more.

One magnolia flower declining into the previous magnolia flower.

A butterfly in the making. 

Remember when I cut down and cut up the dead banana trees and threw the pieces as far as I could in the wild space/poison ivy? Now I have four banana trees growing back there.