The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Sharing My Mountain With Lions

I live among mountain lions.

I share my neighborhood with them.

Did you know that mountain lions (also known as cougars) are the fouth largest cats in the world? Siberian Tigers are first, followed by African lions, then Jaguars, mountain lions are fourth, Leopards are fifth.

The fourth largest of all the cats lives just up our street. Eat your heart out, Isak Dinesen.

Even though their size makes them “big cats,” mountain lions are genetically related more closely to the house cat.

“Here kitty, kitty.”

The sad news is that the only time I’ve ever seen a mountain lion was on the side of the road.

Yes, that’s right. Someone hit and killed a mountain lion. I drove my kids to school the other day and there it was. Someone had obviously hit and killed it in the early hours of the morning.

Mountain lions are crepuscular. (I bet you think I’m smart because I know that word. I do know a few words and that is one of my favorites.) It means mountain lions are active at dawn and dusk—the times when they hunt.

They eat mostly deer, which, as a gardener, makes me very happy because even though deer are cute they are just giant hoofed rats. They harbor ticks with Lyme disease, and they eat my roses.

The only good thing about deer is they provide snacks for the beautiful mountain lions that live near me. Did you know that deer kill on average about 150 people a year?

I say snack away, Mr. Lion.

Now don’t get all worked up. Mountain lions don’t generally lie around my roses waiting for a pesky deer to graze by. They are solitary and shy and they don’t like gardens.

Or people.

Coyote Beautiful

young female coyote in my neighbor's yard

I’ve heard stories that coyotes can be aggressive and I know to be wary of them, but I’ve always been one of those people who give wild animals the benefit of the doubt. Of course I do own a maniacal dog that is part dingo, maybe this is why I feel such kinship with coyotes.

Proof that wild animals can live side by side with humans

My dog even looks like a coyote–see?

 
coyote

                maniacal dingo-dog

I live in the country just outside suburbia, which is an ideal place for the coyotes. But did you know that coyotes do very well in suburban areas. Did you know that coyotes eat mostly rodents and scavenge roadkill? Which means they keep the rodent population down and they act like hairy street sweepers.

Yes, they have been know to nosh on beloved family pets like cats but, excuse me cat lovers, cats aren’t indigenous. As a matter of fact they have been know to wreak havoc on the environment. Please don’t send me any hate mail, just keep your cats in at night if you love them.

Even though coyotes have been known to attack humans, attacks are rare. For one thing coyotes are about the same size as my dog. She weighs about 42 pounds soaking wet after eating a large bean burrito. Of course a coyote may weigh a little more because of the whole tail thing.

Did you know that coyotes sometimes mate with wolves and some of the coyotes that live in the Northeast and Canada are a hybrid of the two?

Did you know that coyotes have been known to mate with dogs and that the resulting offspring are known as coydogs? Personally, I prefer the term dogotes. I think this name is catchier and that if I market the dogote. I could ask $1,000 apiece. It would be right up there with Labradoodles. Hey, what about a poodle and a coyote? The Coyoodle. Just remember, you heard it here first.

Wake Up and Smell the Free Crepe Myrtle

Life can get us all down sometimes.

No matter how blessed and lucky we are, sometimes (especially with the current state of the economy) we get just plain sad.

Well I have been just plain sad. So sad that I haven’t even felt like gardening or blogging—or blogging about gardening.

But an act of generosity by a friend helped to snap me out of my funk and back into the garden,

My girlfriend Smitha is going through a home remodel and has had to tear up her entire garden. She had a beautiful crepe myrtle that was going to be destroyed so she asked me if I wanted it.

I said, “Yes!” My landscape guys removed it for me and planted it, and voila, a beautiful new tree.

During the tree wrangling process I started to pull weeds and cut back straggly plants and the next things I knew I was gardening again and all was right with the world.

Renew, reuse, recycle—rejoice.

Keeyla And Me

Something strange happened the other day.

I went for a walk with my girlfriend.

I wasn’t going to go because I was wearing platform sandals and she wanted to walk up into the hill to this winery with our dogs.

My dog just happened to be in my car and I had an hour before I was to pick up my kids, so I decided to hike up the hill.

On the way up it started to rain, which was weird in itself.

We kept walking up toward the winery. We made it all the way up and strolled around with the dogs. We looked at the views, at the fountains, the gardens and then we turned and started back. We talked. We asked each other what the weekend held. I told my friend that I wanted to visit the Keeyla Meadows garden in Albany.

Keeyla Meadows is my absolute favorite garden designer/ artist. Keeyla’s gardens incorporate her art, her sculptures, her ceramics and her mosaics.  She uses brightly colored plants and flowers. Her designs are always interesting, engaging and amusing.

 

I have been meaning to visit her gardens for months, but, Keeyla’s garden is in Albany and Albany is at least an hour away and I have two kids, a psycho dog and a skinny husband. Oh yeah—and two acres of my own gardens.

I may never get there.

So my friend and I were walking our dogs through the foothills and I happen to glance down this driveway and who is standing there directing some workers who are placing plants? Keeyla Meadows.

I am not kidding.

I stopped dead in my tracks, giving my dog whiplash. My girlfriend stopped and looked back at me. “What’s wrong?” She says. I look up at her and say, “That’s Keeyla Meadows.” She asks, “Are you going to go say hi?”

Northern Pacific Rattlesnake

It’s always a good feeling to do spring cleaning in the old garden. I think I mentioned before that my husband and I removed an old, icky, woodpile and a heap of broken concrete. We were concentrating on a part of the yard that had been neglected for a long time. This is great for us but not so good for the creatures that made their homes in the piles of wood and concrete.

The before picture

Going

Going

Almost gone

Ta-da

About five days after we removed the junk, someone else came home. That certain someone was none other that a Northern Pacific Rattlesnake, (crotalus oreganos oreganos), which, while watering some daisies, I almost stepped on. Oopsie.

I pivoted on one foot and put the other one down about 12- or 16-inches from this foot-long snake.

I froze immediately and I noticed something interesting—rattlesnakes don’t just coil and rattle their rattles when they’re scared, they try to get as flat as they can. This poor little snake was so flat I thought for a moment maybe I had already stepped on it.

I called to my husband and he brought me the trusty rattlesnake cooler. I picked up a long stick and herded it into it’s home for the night.

The next morning, after showing it to my son’s Cub Scout den, once again we took the displaced snake up our hill to a safe location—both for the snake and for people.

We sang our favorite verse of “Born Free,” dumped it out, and then ran like hell in the other direction

Released and look, she blends!

Stumble It!

Ladybug Nursery

Ladybug Larvae on my columbine

Some times I wish I were more of a ruthless gardener.

The sight of the dreaded ladybug nursery

Yesterday was the perfect day to weed. The ground was damp. The sky was overcast and the temperature was 69 degrees. I had a weed patch waiting for me, calling my name. I already had pictured in my mind how good it would look afterward. In my mind I was sitting in the middle of the weedless patch drinking a victory beer.

The beer was chilling in the fridge.

I started to weed. I pulled out my first clump. It pulled away from the ground oh so easily—root and all. Ah, the perfect moment. A moment made all the more perfect by the sighting of a ladybug.

Garden Hero

The other day, I asked a friend why I loved my new dog so much.

She said she thought that it was just transference of my love for the two dogs I had lost recently.

She is probably right.

But today I have a new reason to put my new precious pup on a pedestal.

My new dog is a gardening star: She, Moondoggie, killed a gopher.

My husband, my dog, and I decided to brave the downpour and take a walk. I didn’t take a camera because it truly was a downpour. It was so wet that as we strolled through an open field we could see the little rodent holes filling up, some were bubbling as the air inside was being replaced with water.

This particular element of the rainstorm was not good for little ground dwelling creatures. We moved our eyes from the little bubbling burrows to our dog romping through the deluge. She was running with joy as usual, when all of a sudden her ears perked forward she leapt into the air and pounced.

Rattlesnake In My Cooler

I like to go to parties. I like to dance. I’m one of those dancers who think (after a couple of drinks) that I’m in an MTV video.

I’m not sure, because I’ve never been filmed dancing (thank God), that I embarrass myself (and those in close proximity) who know me well. As for the other people who see me dance, I’m just one of those drunken dancers that people poke each other in the side about. “Oh my God, look at her, what a freakshow.” Last Saturday was no exception. My kids stayed home with my jetlagged husband and I went to a party that my friend Kim and her sister-in-law Jerilyn threw.

There I was, dancing away to bad eighties music, thinking I was Janet Jackson or Madonna or MC Hammer and I began to vibrate. At first I thought it was just me, that I was dancing so well I was vibrating or maybe it was all the tequila I had consumed, then I realized it was my phone.

I snapped out of my post-disco daze and checked the number. It was my home phone. That can’t be good. I stepped away from the rhythmic din of “Brick House” and answered my phone.

This is what I heard: “Mom? Mom? Mommy?”

“Yes honey, it’s Mommy. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing Mommy, I just wanted to tell you that we just caught a rattlesnake and it’s in the red cooler.”

Silence from my end. Echoing in my ear—“She’s a brick house, she’s mighty, mighty, letting it all hang out.”

“Is Daddy there?”

“Yeah, he put the snake in the cooler for us.”

“Can it get out?”

“No”

“O.K., don’t touch it. Mommy will be home later.”

Can You Please Help Genie Help Farmers?

I woke up, a couple of mornings ago, to the sound of the alarm on my computer’s battery backup system, telling me that our power was off. It was 4:30 in the morning. The windows were open and soon I could smell smoke. A few minutes later I could hear the CDF helicopters in the air above our house. The power off, the smell of smoke, the sound of helicopters…uh oh. I had just undergone oral surgery and even in my Vicodin-induced stupor I knew that all this added up to something bad.

I nudged my husband into consciousness, and used my throbbing tooth as an excuse to stay in bed. Being the wonderful husband he is, he got up; got in is car and drove down the hill to see if we should start packing up valuables.

We were lucky. A tree had fallen over onto some power lines, which sparked a brush fire. The brush fire just happened to start directly across the street from the California Department of Forestry fire station, fortunate for us. They put it out quickly and our power was restored 12 hours later.

There are fires in our hills once again. There are 1400 burning in the state of California at this moment. There also have been floods in Iowa. Natural disasters on both ends of the spectrum, both destructive, both changing lives forever.

The one thing they have in common is that they both bring people together.

Genie, of the Inadvertent Gardener, has asked me to put the word out about the farmers In Iowa. As you have probably heard, the 500-year flood has done major damage to Iowa and the land along parts of the Mississippi river. Some of the people affected are the small farm farmers, the people that you buy food from at the farmer’s market.

Genie wants us to help these people. For more information on what you can do to help please visit her at The Inadvertent Gardener.

Honeymooning Newts News

They were a little late for Valentine’s Day.

But yesterday, the local amphibian world was one giant orgy of love. My neighbor Jacqueline called me and got very excited when telling me about the newts that were spawning in our nearby lake. She told me they were everywhere and it would be worth my while to take my boys and check it out.

One of my boys has been down with the flu for several days now so I grabbed my youngest and we went down to the lake to check it out. My husband came with us and took some fabulous photos of the honeymooning newts. I realized when I came back home and compared our photos that I need a new camera.