stubbed toes and mud pies

i did a fair bit more weeding today and saw some squash seeds sprouting (and removed them before they could take over). at least i made a good dent and improved the general looks of several gardens, but i did not finish weeding any of the four gardens i was in. there's big enough areas involved that weeding an entire garden can take a while if there's a lot of weeds to deal with and sort through. luckily i only have the onion patch that is in bad shape and i got some of that done today. so perhaps i can get that finished up this weekend or early next week.

plenty of other small projects going on and also dealing with getting the faucet on the back of the house fixed and still some other things i'd like to get done before full on planting season arrives.

2 miscreants (aka chipmunks) were lured in by the sweet seduction of the dried grape to their dooms... it's not something i really enjoy doing, but we're really getting overrun by chipmunks already and the season is just getting started.

i'm wondering how many i will have to keep trapping before i start to notice a difference and can perhaps take down Stonehenge III (Stonehenge I is the original, Stonehenge II is the one in Washington State that I saw many years ago). Stonehenge III i will have to get a picture of before i take it apart and return the components to where they belong. hopefully sooner rather than later...

i think i have both the peas and beans sprouting.

It was a busy day and yesterday afternoon I was feeling some responsibility slide off me until I looked out the window at the neighbor's lawn.

A big, full-grown marmot!

I have never seen a marmot within a half mile from home. They were a torment in the distant garden, with its several acres of fallow ground and widely separated houses. Dang. I went out and mowed the lawn in the backyard – attempting to assert my presence and, hopefully, to drive Marty off in another direction.

Steve

digitS' said:

It was a busy day and yesterday afternoon I was feeling some responsibility slide off me until I looked out the window at the neighbor's lawn.

A big, full-grown marmot!

I have never seen a marmot within a half mile from home. They were a torment in the distant garden, with its several acres of fallow ground and widely separated houses. Dang. I went out and mowed the lawn in the backyard – attempting to assert my presence and, hopefully, to drive Marty off in another direction.

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that's a good start and i sure hope it worked.

they are like many other creatures in this world that will have so many babies that they all need new territories when they get bigger or perhaps it was driven out of its existing territory (new construction or clearing of land or repairs to ditches and drains).

i have buried one groundhog so far and shot at another, but i don't know if i actually hit that one. i'm sure there are more around. two large drainage ditches and plenty of den sites already burrowed out for them.

digitS' said:

It was a busy day and yesterday afternoon I was feeling some responsibility slide off me until I looked out the window at the neighbor's lawn.

A big, full-grown marmot!

I have never seen a marmot within a half mile from home. They were a torment in the distant garden, with its several acres of fallow ground and widely separated houses. Dang. I went out and mowed the lawn in the backyard – attempting to assert my presence and, hopefully, to drive Marty off in another direction.

Steve

Click to expand...

Was he a 24 pounder!?

Might have been @Dahlia , but I doubt it .

I thought that they had a pet rabbit, at first. They have a Corgi but she is fenced into the back. Next door, there's an old bulldog. A whole group of littledogs behind that house. Across the street, a malamute. At least 3 tomcats in the immediate neighborhood (theywon'tbeabletohelp) .... Where I think he might be coming from is the elementary school playground, the only nearby open ground. They have trees completely surrounding the school property. I can't imagine that they will tolerate it there but it might be that the grounds keepers will wait for school to be out for Summer to do anything.

Raccoon visitors in my yard before but they have broader territories than marmots.

more than a month before summer and i'm already on summer heat schedule. feels pretty humid and hot out there in the mid 80sF. so now i'm trying to get out early and work in a garden or two before it gets too hot (and i get too tired) to do anything more than come in and siesta. i just finished brunch a few minutes ago. was not the least bit hungry until Mom made some soup for her and then it was time for me to warm up some garlic bread with cheese on it and also had about a cup of tomato juice and few wedges of oranges.

i did finish up weediig the onion garden (which hadn't been done since last fall sometime) and cleaned some weeds out a pathway (they were purple columbines, but since Mom did not want them in the pathway they were called weeds by me) and then i took 15 minutes to scrape through the daylily patch i'm trying to remove - it's about 90% gone compared to where it was before, but it will still need to be scraped once in a while or weeded if i do plant beans in there (that for sure is my intent ).

i also found one small sprout of poison ivy and another in a different place. i removed both as the last things i did and then i took those garden gloves off and put them in the trash - the gloves were well due for being tossed anyways (three years is a pretty good run for lightweight gloves - usually what happens is that the plastic degrades and gets too hard for them to be very comfortable any more).

as usual i started the garden chores by watering my seedlings/sprouts/plantings of beans and peas just to make sure they were not too dry during today's sunshine and warmth. nothing seems to be bothering them.

*whew!* we had a plumber out yesterday and he was competent, quick, had the right part and tools and got it done at a reasonable price. i was a bit worried based upon the previous experience with this company, but i was also worrying that we weren't going to have hoses out and ready in case we needed them during a dry spell.

he commented about liking our yard and front gardens and i mentioned that we also had more out back, which he then saw and said his girlfriend was trying to get a garden going. i said anytime he wanted to send her over to garden i'd be quite happy with that as a joke.

right before leaving he asked if he and his girlfriend could stop over sometime and i said sure it would be fun and that i had plenty of experience in knowing what not to do and how to make things easier. if i'd been thinking i'd have given him my little slip of paper that has the website and e-mail address, but i can text that to them today...

nothing planted yet other than those peas and beans from a few weeks ago.

starts will be here soon, so we'll have to work around those and get them planted.

onions, peppers, tomatoes.

the Beaver Dam peppers i was hoping to plant did not make it. so while i do have more seeds i don't have the time to restart them. rather irked by this, but will leave it at that...