DON'T LET THE CAT OUT OF THE BAG!

One day last week:
Rusty, like most cats, loves to crawl into boxes and bags. This bag was put up on 'his' sofa so the floor could be vacuumed... He promptly crawled into it and went to sleep.

Your eyes are getting sleepy...... they are closing.........

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Meanwhile, out under the hydrangea, Spook has found a new sleeping place.

He is sure the eagles won't see him under here. If that had been Hoover, we would never have seen her. Instead, she found a different place - closer to the food dishes!

Here is Hoover is doing her best windshield wiper imitation.

HOOVER and SPOOK

One day last week, a neighbor asked me if I had a little grey tabby cat… one had been visiting his place recently. I assumed it was Hoover as she often disappears back thru the woods behind the house. So far, she seems scared of the road out front and so confines her travels into the woods around my place and back to Frank’s behind me.

            Hoover got her name from the way she attacked food when she first came here. Her dish was so clean you would not have known any food had even been in it. The bowl of crunchies looked vacuumed including the floor around it. In some other countries, the word Hoover is synonymous with cleaning. A neighbor from the UK says he is going to Hoover his car when he just means cleaning it out, not necessarily vacuuming. Hoover still acts like any meal is the first she has had in a week… often her week is 2 hours long! And she eats her food as rapidly as she can then jumps down to push Spook away from his food and clean his bowl up, too. Sigh. Poor old Spook, never the fighter, at age 14 he just moseys away and takes a nap. (You know “the grass is always greener???” Well for Hoover, the food in the other bowl is always better.)

            Anyway, the point of this post is to give anyone interested a view of this little girl kitty… a strange little thing, totally unspectacular in appearance, who squeaks, does not meow, and pesters poor old Spook because she so wants to play. Poor old man. But, he is no longer growling at her and actually does play wrestle a bit. Then it is serious nap time.

            Hoover is a great hunter. She stalks anything that moves, including deer. I have watched her do that, moving from bush to bush, belly to the ground, hiney twitching in anticipation of the moment of attack. I have never had a camera ready when she does these things, so you will just have to take my word for it. But last week, oh how I wish I had had a video camera for her last great adventure. To start with, I heard the bird – a very distinctive cry. So I looked around to see where it was. I have a family of them that live on my land and I feel so fortunate. I have posted about them before. This time, it sounded like the bird was up in the big hackberry tree behind my house. It definitely was close by… while scanning the tree for a glimpse of its distinctive colors and markings, I saw something else moving slowly up a big branch of the tree. As you have seen, Hoover is ‘dressed’ in perfect camouflage, she can disappear almost anywhere… but this bird can’t.

            It squawked again and flapped its wings at her. Hoover paused blending in with the bark of the tree, but she had definitely interrupted its snacking on the tree. We all held still, probably barely breathing. I tried to sneak closer, basically not believing my eyes… Hoover was stalking a Pileated Woodpecker that is probably bigger than she is. She crept up her branch a little further. She was probably less than 5 feet away from him. I thought, my god, what if this was a raptor and not a woodpecker? We do have a family of red-tail hawks here, too, and a family of great horned owls, both of which could pick her up in a heartbeat and have a tasty meal for their young ones.

            One more sneaky creep up the branch and the woodpecker had had enough. It opened its huge wings and flew out away from the tree, but then turned and flew back aiming straight for Hoover! I remembered a mocker than used to dive-bomb Punkin like that. I thought OMG! That long pointed beak would totally skewer Poor little Hoovie! OH NO!  But the bomber jet pulled up in plenty of time to miss Hoover, BUT, that dumb cat stood on her hind feet to make a grab at the bird! YIKES! What kind of an idiot is this????  Needless to say, she missed, in fact she almost fell out of the tree in her excitement. The Pileated flew off to snack at another tree deeper in the woods and Hoover backed down the tree. I started to breathe again, but I swear, my knees were weak!  

            Anyway, here are a few shots I took of Hoovie and Spook out in the yard the other day. Spook is still sleeping in his favorite Adirondack. I keep a big board on it to keep him dry when it sprinkles and he doesn’t want to move. It also keeps him in the shade, and it gives Hoover a place to nap or wash after she gets tired of pestering him.

And in case you forgot, our Pileated Woodpecker

CAN THE GRAY FOX REALLY CLIMB TREES?

IN A WORD, YES.  BUT… it also depends on the tree. He can’t go up very far on a straight tree, but if he tries a tree that is angled or had relatively low branches, he is as agile as a cat. Well, going up, but coming down- not so much. Mostly it is a leap to the ground. I have never been lucky enough to see any of my foxes climb the trees around here, but I borrowed some shots from google’s image files.

   

“My” fox has been known to go up a neighbor’s tree and have a snack of baby robins. I heard the racket, the birds did not sit back quietly and allow it to happen, but by the time my neighbor got his camera, the fox was running back into the woods and part of the nest was on the ground and the robins were flying above the fox yelling some serious curses at him, I am sure.

Meanwhile, back at the compost pile “my” fox had just finished up some baked potato skins which the coon really loves, licked the cheese and sour cream off her nose and spotted my camera… and off she ran. Mrs Coonie-Bear decided to try her luck at any left over cat food. She could care less about me standing there with the camera.

 

in case you are interested, that big black thing behind the coonie-bear is a gro-bag with carrots in it. Part of my container “farming.” The pink flowers behind the fox are peonies.

Spook was enjoying his time on the patio having already eaten his dinner. Perhaps he was amused to know they would find nothing but an empty dish at his dinner place. He no longer runs from the other critters tho he used to climb up on the barn roof when the previous fox lived here.

 

Thanks for visiting my garden/zoo!

PLAYING CATCH UP – SPRING GARDEN

OK, OK, I know I have been unbelievably busy… and yes, I must admit, I am slowing down. A lot. SIGH. But I promised several of you pictures from the yard this spring. This has been a very different spring… the winter stretched itself out longer than usual and colder than usual, so that meant camellias that normally bloom in the winter – start in December, actually, were blooming at the same time as the later spring camellias. It made for an exciting spring but a bleak winter. I am used to having fresh flowers on my table just about all winter long. Anyway, here are the plants in the order in which they bloomed. Some of the shots are more to show the size of the bushes than to brag about the beauty of the blooms. And many of the blooms this spring were tinged with just a hint of frost bite – but it took a real close look to notice it.

                         

So there you have it… these were taken one month ago. did I mention I have been busy? OK, next, the azaleas a couple weeks later. Note - PP= Pink Perfection, 2 variations I and II.

TAMING THE WILDERNESS

Its that time of year when many of us plan our gardens, leaf thru seed catalogs, plan new flower beds, wonder if the old mower will make it thru another season… some of us wonder if we will make it thru another season.

For a long, long time I have wanted to clear out the thicket on the acre east of the house. It has been a slow job, doing almost microscopic sections at a time, then watching the jungle grow back when I would have a summer with too much pain to do any work out there. Though actually, summer is probably not the right word – most of the work outside gets done in the spring or autumn, sometimes in the winter if it is a mild one, but summer is usually too beastly hot to get much more done than keep things watered and the basic grass cutting. Tree cutting is best done in the winter when the sap is not running. That is also a good time to not get into poison ivy as it is dormant unless you decide to pull its roots. Late fall, winter, and early spring are also the best times to work outside because there are no mosquitoes and ticks are fewer except on those really warm days when they wake up and decide they are hungry and you are delicious. Last year, a friend bought an old house to fix up. I gave him a load of camellias and another friend, an azalea grower, sold me a bunch of azaleas, at wholesale, for him. The only catch was, John had to dig the camellias up. So, while he was digging, he dug up more than he could use and we planted them out on the edge of my “thicket” and another friend put a park bench together for me in the middle of it all. Preston brought me a big piece of slate for under the bench, and things started to look good. I didn’t even mind the other half acre of junk trees and bramble that much. The middle was cleaned and slowly getting planted in baby camellias.

   

A couple months ago I posted a couple pictures from the bench toward the thicket. The cedar tree and the trees with yellow leaves are still there, but the jungle behind them is now gone.

Then I asked Charlie to cut down a 20 foot camellia for me next to the house as it was where the generator is going to go. It broke my heart to have it cut down, but, it had to go. I remembered it wasn’t much more than a twig when I planted it. But Charlie, chain saw in hand, decided to keep cutting. He headed out to the thicket and kept going. I never knew when he would be out there, or how much he was going to cut, but in a couple weeks, the jungle was cleared, his bush-hog chopped down the miles of vines and bramble and I could walk across that acre for the first time since I moved here. I could always see a beautiful old tree in the far end, but could never get even close enough to it to touch it. Now Charlie has even driven my truck around it! I lost count of the truck loads of wood he took out of there, much of it locust and cherry.

     

In the middle of this jungle, there is a tree that fell, rooted and kept growing, looking like the Loch Ness monster coming out of the earth. Charlie saved that, too, tho he cut the sucker branches off. It is sort of a built in bench out there. Used to ne that Punkin would follow me everywhere I went, but, he is gone. Imagine my surprise to see Spook, my scaredy cat keeping his distance, but exploring the “new” territory with me.

  

We kept a bit of jungle around the edges until I get Preston or someone to plant some evergreens as a wind break on that corner and slowly fill the lot with azaleas and camellias. My goal is to create a meditation garden, a place of Peace, perhaps prayer, contemplation… perhaps a couple redbud trees, a dogwood or two, maybe another fringe tree if I can find one… a beautyberry bush or so to round things out. I think I will sprinkle some digitalis seed here and there, see what grows. Maybe I will put in some daffodils next fall when I have a better sense of the form it will take. Of course, the big challenge will be keeping it clear as the jungle will try to reassert itself come spring.

If you are ever in the area and want to wander by, come on it, sit a spell and be refreshed. Or grab a shovel and plant a camellia!