Hmmm, I still have some green berries left, will have to look for rubber snakes. I do have a garter snake who lives in the garden but doesn't seem to bother the squirrels. Electric netting looks interesting - 28" tall and open at the top good enough? I'm assuming squirrels can't jump that high. I'm also going to build a chicken run (in my spare time LOL) and have the 4ft tall 23 mesh and some poultry wire (my uncle said put UNDER the run as well as over top to keep predators from digging). Electric might work there too? Except I would think you'd still need top (for hawks) and bottom (for foxes digging)... No one thinks I need to move the bed and try to bury the wire to keep the rodents out?

We have a major problem with voles but were concerned about other animals and kids getting into the traps. So we've made a few 'enclosed' traps that seems to be working. Get PVC piping from your local hardware store in the size you would use for a sewage drain and have them cut it in 3-4 ft sections. Buy end caps the same size as your piping. Cut small holes in the end caps large enough for the voles to get into but small enough to keep other larger animals out. If you put the holes in the right place other animals (insects, snakes, etc) shouldn't crawl up to get inside of the trap. We mix mice poison with peanut butter and place inside the PVC pipe then put the end caps on each end. Lay these around on their sides (long ways) in your garden/yard in places that the voles travel around. You'll notice the peanut butter will disappear a little each day. If not, move the pipe to another spot. This has slowly dwindled the infestation we've had of voles but have a long way to go since we live in a wooded area off of a golf course (lots of food for the voles - they think its a perfect place to have made their home and MULTIPLY!).

Carol, You know, all the oxhearts I've ever grown have the wilty gene and look like crap half the time. I'm forever looking at them and thinking "what in the world is wrong with you?" and then I realize it is an oxheart and wilty looking, wimpy looking foliage is normal for it. If that's the kind of wilty look it has to it, that's normal. Maybe this plant is just slower than the others and will shape up soon. My Kim's Civil War Oxheart plants looked worse than anything else in the garden until one day they just shaped up and got over it. I don't know if they had a root issue or whatever, but finally they look about as good as anything else. I planted too much cabbage this year (specifically because I wanted to make a lot of sauerkraut) and I finally have harvested the last of the cabbage and my long cabbage shredding/sauerkraut making nightmare is going to end today. I'm glad I have made it, and I've used several recipes so we have sauerkraut flavor options, but I'll be happy to not look at another head of cabbage for a few months after I finish making sauerkraut today. I love cabbage, but too much of it is still too much. My front garden is in really great shape, other than the diseases that accompany constant wetness, but the back garden is way behind. It has been too wet to plant for virtually all of May and now, with yesterday's deluge, I don't know when I'll get it planted. I suppose it will be pretty much a fall garden, other than the sweet corn that is tasseling back there now, because by the time I get it planted, nothing in it is going to produce much of anything until late summer or early autumn. I suspect this always will be an issue in the back garden in wet years until we finally get raised, vole-proof beds built back there. I do not have all my summer things in either, and I blame it on the rain. I only have watermelons planted in the front garden because I had a lot of Sugar Baby volunteers sprouting in one bed where I grew them last year, so I dug them up and transplanted them to another bed at the low north end of the garden. Hopefully they'll survive the rain and runoff from yesterday. I still have 5 or 6 more icebox melon varieties to get planted somewhere, somehow. The okra I had planted died so I have to replant it, and I'm way behind on planting melons and winter squash. I did notice that a commercial farm near Thackerville that always grows southern peas and muskmelons doesn't have theirs in yet either, undoubtedly due to the excessively wet May and now June weather, so at least I'm not any further behind than they are. As soon as this infernal rain stops (we had light to very light rain most of the night), which might be tomorrow, I am going to plant a lot of melon, okra and winter squash seeds in beds where onions have been harvested (I already have lima beans and southern peas in some of that space) and where I just yanked out bush beans on Wednesday as they were nearing the end of their productive period and had developed a major spider mite infestation. I probably could have left the bush beans a couple more weeks if it were not for the spider mites, but the pole beans are blooming now, which made it easier to let go of the old bush bean plans. I've been harvesting from them for 6 or 7 weeks, so they were looking pretty tired and worn out too. Oh, and since I just harvested the last dozen or so cabbage plants, there's all that space to fill up too. In wet years, I stay so behind on planting that it seems like the line between planting the spring and fall garden has become really blurred and I feel like I plant nonstop all spring and summer long as the wet spots finally dry out. I like having rainfall, of course, and never really am hoping for drought, but it sure is easier to get the planting done when the garden isn't ankle deep in water. Yesterday the garden was more like knee deep in runoff at the worst point and I dread seeing it this morning. Our usually quiet little tame 3-season creek usually is about 6 to 8' wide in a good year and has water maybe 2-4' deep in the summer months, except in drought years when it completely dries up. Late yesterday afternoon when I went out in light rain to check it after the heavier rain had fallen, it was a good 10-12' deep, almost out of its banks, and 30-40' wide with heavy runoff. It was crazy. If a person had fallen in that creek, I believe they would have been swept away and unlikely to survive. It is not often our creek looks like a river, but it did yesterday. Our neighbor's huge, steel water gap fencing that goes across the creek on their side of the road to allow water to flow out at times like this but to keep the cattle in was lifted up horizontally by the heavy runoff, and an elephant likely could have walked under it if not for the flooding. I don't think they had any cattle or horses in that field yesterday (great planning on their part) and I was glad to see that because livestock on the wrong side of the creek would have been trapped and unable to go anywhere else. In a lot of ways, yesterday's runoff was worse, with only 3-4" of rain falling in a couple of hours, than last year's 12" that fell over a longer period of time in one day in May and that did horrific flooding. At least it was out here in the country. I don't know if they had damage in town like we have here. Very close friends of ours who live a couple of miles north of us on the same road have a real mess today. Tim was talking to one of them on the phone yesterday, telling him "your driveway is gone, I don't know if Amber will even be able to get her vehicle out of your driveway, which is gone". He repeated the phrase "driveway is just gone" several times. After he got off the phone, I asked how gone it was, and he said 'it is all gone'. I cannot imagine this, as the county road guys had worked with them this spring to try to correct some long-standing drainage issues on the country right-of-way where our friends' driveway repeatedly gets washed out by heavy runoff in the bar ditches. I watched the friend of ours who worked on the bar ditches and driveway and did a lot of work to fix the problem this spring, and was really impressed with all the work he did in that area to try to fix the problem. He was out there with a road grader and other equipment when Fran and I were going to fires, I guess it was, and the driveway and bar ditches looked great after a couple of days' work. It looked so great that I thought the problem finally had been solved. Apparently not. There's a long strip of homes there that have a constant issue of that sort and no matter what anyone does to repair the mess after a very heavy rainfall, it seems like the problem recurs over and over again. There's still roadway problems here with areas not fully repaired and functioning from last year's floods, and here we are with new flooding and new damage. And, by the way, their house was struck by lighting during the early morning storms yesterday, (but at least it didn't catch fire) so it was a bad day all around at their place. I suspect all of us will be out this weekend trying to fix the damage to all our gravel (and, for some folks, dirt and no gravel) driveways. Runoff carved gullies in our driveway and washed gravel down into the road and bar ditch, but with a couple of hours of work once the rain stops, we ought to be able to fix it pretty quickly. For some folks, the damage is so severe it might take longer to get it repaired. It seems like rainfall here just refuses to fall in amounts that are just right. It always is feast or famine, flood or drought. If it rains again today, I hope the heavy bands miss us. We've had more than enough. At our house, we pretty much got our average June rainfall all in a couple of days time. Dawn

nannygoat18 - The results are in. Our Eskie is at the correct hypothyroid dose! Yikes. He will be retested again in 6 months. The crying is just so hard. Thanks for your tips on snacks for him. I am hesitant to give him anything frozen since he swallows everything whole - and of course there is the issue of the RIP Kong... He does like carrots but I slice pieces for him due to the potential choking hazard of some of the baby carrots (I once saw a dog choke on a baby carrot, but thankfully the dog did survive). We have been giving him lettuce and green beans a lot. His preference is arugula (he is a fancy dog) but will eat head lettuce - he likes the crunchy pieces. It is getting increasingly hard to find head lettuce that is fit to buy in Ontario - a lot of very brown lettuce out there. His green beans are cooked and then chopped small and handed out like kibble. He also gets pieces of his Fromm kibble as snacks. Then there are his Nuzzles (he likes duck and cherry) and his Thinkers - he gets half a day and his half a dental cookie smeared with CET toothpaste. He knows exactly when he gets each. Unfortunately he tried to eat the toothbrush when I tried brushing his teeth and he is inclined to develop tartar so we have had a few dentals. He lives such a hard life! Being deaf has made things more difficult for him. I did have him checked out by the vet though just in case he did have an ear infection. But no, he is deaf. Good thing I taught him some hand signals as a pup and that several years ago we had a deaf white cat, so we have had some experience in dealing with this issue. His sense of smell is fabulous though. Our vet told us that losing sense of smell is a big thing so he has that going for him. He is worth it though. I hope that Kirby is doing well and enjoying that bitter apple.