Back Yard

So, this is what our back yard looks like right now, looking from the far corner towards the other end of the yard.

You can see our compost pile to the left of the power pile, the tomato plants in the foreground, squash plants in the garden behind the tomato plants.  The peach tree there looks good and healthy, but the question is, will we get even one peach!  That little red bird house hanging on the peach tree has been getting lots of visits from two little wrens.  Looks like they are making it their home!

Today is the Battle of Flowers parade downtown.  It's a cool damp day - good actually for a parade.  We aren't going to it, though.

The latest on the squirrel/raccoon/dove wars.

The raccoons apparently have given up on trying to get to the bird feeders.  Every night the feeders are left out and in the morning they are untouched and in place.  So, Guillermo won there.  He came up with that amazing way to hang the feeders that stymies both the squirrels AND the raccoons.  And even the doves.  They TRY to hang on to the feeder but it is just too precarious for them and what they end up doing is just hanging around underneath the feeders waiting for whatever the finches, titmice, cardinals, and chickadees drop.

But last night, the raccoons or SOMEthing went on a mini rampage.  They knocked over the little frog fountain and they ripped all the leaves off the bottom of the persimmon tree!

So, Guillermo has won in some ways, and lost in others.  Another way he has lost is quite discouraging.  He has discovered that the squirrels are eating the little peaches that are growing on our peach tree.  The peaches aren't even bigger than the size of a peach pit, and they must be hard as rocks, but still the squirrels are eating, or TRYING to eat them.  It's discouraging because if they are willing to eat them at this stage, then there's no hope for any peach to last on that tree that's nice and plump and juicy.

So, win in some ways, lose in others.  Maybe all we'll be able to have in the backyard is a flower garden!

Guillermo did not stay up last night to observe the raccoons.  He was already tired and he was thinking that maybe they wouldn't be coming around the first night since there hasn't been any food left out for them this past week and they may have given up coming around.

This morning, the feeders were exactly as he left them the day before so the raccoons either did not come around or they tried to get to the feeders and couldn't.   This is his new set up.

We're wondering if they'll be able to stand on the fence and reach up.  Or climb the pole and hang on the wire.  We shall see.....

New attempt

So, the battle between Guillermo and the raccoons has been on hold for a while.  Guillermo has been bringing all the bird feeders in every single night so there hasn't been any chance for the raccoons to get anything lately.  But Guillermo was doing this as he was planning his next move.  He spent quite a bit of time at Home Depot yesterday just looking around to see what other items he could find that could possibly be used to hand, AND thwart, those raccoons.

So, this is his new set up.  And it's going to be another night of  not getting much sleep for him as most of the night he's going to monitor how the raccoons approach and deal with the feeders like this.

Tired today

Guillermo was up a lot of the night last night observing the raccoons.  He watched as they actually climbed that narrow little pole and even hung around on the top of it.  And here we thought that there was no way a raccoon would be able to navigate that skinny pole.  But they put their feet flat against the pole and work their way up.

Guess it's now on to Plan J..........  Well, not really.  He hasn't tried that many times, but it SEEMS like it.

Before living in this house, I would always admire all the homes that had oak trees in their yards.  Oak trees always seemed so majestic.  We had Ash trees at our old house and while they were nice, Ash trees have problems and during the spring they drop stuff and coat everything with pollen.  Well, Oak trees do the exact same thing!

We have one Oak tree in our front yard - a very nice one.  First it was all the little oak leaves that fell day after day after day.  Filling up our pots and getting in the gardens and making everything look messy.  Raking our own yard would help some, but leaves from the neighbor's yards and trees usually made their way into our yard anyway.  Now the Oaks have stopped dropping leaves and instead are now coating everything with yellow pollen and dropping old flower blossoms.   Look at the pollen all over our table and chair!

And unlike Ash trees, we have been told that Oak trees go through all that process TWO times a year.  We shall see.......

Raccoons = relentless

The score may be Guillermo 5 - Raccoons 25 now.  Those raccoons have figured out a way to get to Guillermo's latest set up that he was pretty sure was going to foil them.  This problem is not going away anytime soon, apparently.  So, he re-configured the setup of the feeders and we'll see how round 10 goes tonight.

Here's Guillermo working on making those feeders more difficult to reach.

So, we'll see how THIS works.

Garden's growing nicely, the peach tree is no longer blooming and has small peaches on it and to the left of the peach tree you can see the new little tree that Guillermo planted.  A persimmon.  AND, he ALMOST chopped another TV cable digging the hole for that tree.  We're not sure if it's part of our other cable or if it is the cable to the neighbor's house.  But he saw this one in time.  Whew!

There's the new little Fuyu Persimmon.  The garden behind it by the fence is the garden Guillermo was digging when he chopped the cable last week.

We've got a few little blackberries on the way.  Hope they stay on till they're ripe.

Blueberries waiting to be planted, with an artichoke plant between them.

And Guillermo just planted a little Celeste Fig tree next to our lantanas.

Guillermo cleaned up the side yard where he stores most of his gardening stuff so it looks a lot neater.  He also planted a Lady Banks Rose all the way to the back of this picture (which is actually towards the front of our house).  We're hoping the Lady Banks rose takes off and covers that wooden fence.

Big MAJOR oops

Guillermo and I enjoyed yesterday a lot.  The weather was nice and warm with the promise of some good rain later on in the evening.  We did a lot of stuff outside such as raking up leaves, repotting plants and then deciding to dig up another area for a new garden.

Oops.  Well, in the late afternoon Guillermo is out there hacking away a line in the grass with his pick axe.  I'm inside getting ready to transfer some money online into our savings.  Next thing I know the internet is off and the TV quits working.  Ok, the internet goes out sometimes, so hopefully it'll be back on soon.  Nope.  Guillermo comes in a little while later saying he has some bad news.  Yep.  He chopped the cable line.  So THAT'S why the TV went out and the internet left.  I went outside to see and sure enough, the line is chopped in half.  It figures that the very line he was cutting in to the dirt to create the border of the garden was along the exact same path that the cable line was running.  Crazy thing is, this cable line was like only two inches under the dirt.

When we moved in, we had the utility company out to our house to show us where the electric lines are and the gas lines are.  Those are all marked and we know the depth of those - 18 inches.  We just had no idea that the cable line was running where it was and that it would be so shallow.

Oh well.  No internet or TV now until Thursday morning.  That's the earliest they could come out.  At LEAST we have a USB modem that we keep so that we can have internet at my mom's house.  Thankfully. It sure came in handy yesterday and today.  At least with that, I was able to keep track of those storms last night, and we were still able to chat with Fernando a little bit.

Today, it looks like those storms are firing up again.  It's gotten quite dark outside (at 10:45am) and we hear thunder.  Here we go again!
It rained pretty much all day, sometimes really hard.  It was quite cool today, too, as the rain ushered in a little cold front.
So, not being able to watch TV while we ate dinner, we had dinner at the table in the room by the back deck.  It's a great place to eat while watching whatever is going on outside.  As we were finishing dinner, Guillermo focuses on something outside and realizes that it is an opossum.  This opossum was fairly big and really white!  It ambled around out in the field for quite a while and it decided to checked out the trash pile, too.  It climbed up and around on the old, certainly sopping wet, carpet just checking all that junk out.  Then we lost sight of it for a little while but not too much later, we noticed it ambling around at the bottom of a tree.  We chuckled when we saw it start climbing the tree - this little opossum was great entertainment!  The tree it decided to climb has a good sized hole in it so we figured its destination was the hole, which is about 15 or 20 feet above the ground.  It got to the hole and almost slipped as it tried to get in the hole.  Then it kept struggling around the hole (since it was getting kind of dark, we couldn't see all that well what its problem was), and we wondered why it wasn't just going right into the hole.  For all we knew, there was another animal in the hole that wasn't allowing it to get in.  The next thing we know, the opossum is falling to the ground!  That was quite a fall for the poor guy and it landed right on its back.  We don't know what the opossum did next since it was hidden in the grass at the bottom of the tree.  But I still have the image of that opossum falling the 15 or 20 feet to the ground, feet sticking up in the air.  Sorry, but yeah, it was a little funny......

Anyway, who knows WHAT we miss sometimes because we watch TV while we eat!  But we really do like  watching a show while we have dinner.  We just finished the series called "Breaking Bad" which we really liked although it sometimes was not the best thing to watch while eating.  We look forward to when Season 5 is available to stream.

Right now, when the TV is working that is, we are watching "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".  We were very pleasantly surprised to find that the movie actually is in Swedish with subtitles, so we are looking forward to watching more of the movie and trying to catch and understand as much as we can without looking at the subtitles!