Very nice! What species is the snake?

Resin

Resin, I don't really know, just assumed it's a garden variety garter snake. Since our 1/4 acre is organic with creeklets and little bridges and lots of rocks / stones / walls and over 300 trees, and 26 bird stations, we have lots of snakes. Many are yellow or orange or red or green or purple, many colorful patterns. They sun themselves in the branches and vines. They have lots of babies. They eat slugs! Spring / summer / fall, if it is sunny and warm, one can't go walking around here without seeing them draped all over the walls, bridges, trees and vines.

They like the evergreens better than the deciduous.

Hoping gardeners post their pictures of critter ornaments.

Snakes are pretty strange to see in "the valley" of Orygun, but they are here. Normally...Garter Snakes are what you find, small and take care of smaller pests. Once you get down the Columbia River Gorge into Eastern OR, the snakes are not so fun to play with :-))).....

There be rattlers there, BUT eastern side has 2 critters I want for slug-feasting: toads and gopher snakes (which also eat moles!). Tried to buy toads and gopher snakes but it's illegal. At least these little cute garter snakes eat slugs and mole & mouse babies, has to be small.

If I could just get a few big snakes that love to eat rats the balance here would be perfect.

Another picture of same garter snake as above, sunning on new front fence and young ceanothus bush:

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Pretty! Looks like a Western Garter snake. I like snakes and wish we had some in our garden areas. Our landscape is still somewhat new, so I guess it just needs to mature a bit.

Wow, I have never before seen such a large garter snake.

Your area must be nearly perfect for their needs.

He (or she) is about medium size for here. There's some really big ones that are dark brown. But there's oodles of tiny babies slithering all around with very pretty markings and colors. When it's warm and sunny walking here is a trip with so many jumpy spiders, snakes, frogs, bugs I can't ID yet, birds, and far too many slugs everywhere. Can't even touch a leaf without an itty bitty slug sticking to finger.

The snakes love to hide in the cottage stone retaining walls and beds. Don't see them in winter. I keep praying some person with big pet snakes that like to eat rats accidentally drops those big snakes off in my yard, LOL Sometimes fantasy of ideal solutions is the only way to get through the day ...

Anybody know a charm song for attracting slug-eating toads and rat-eating snakes?

Sounds like a job for the pied piper.

say more about 26 bird stations on a quarter acre. What you must spend on seed! although I bet its worth it. What birds are you attracting that you might not see if you were not feeding? Are you in a urban, suburban or rural location?
Marie

Hi Marie ... I've been a caregiver for 34 years and will be having a patient in here, one at a time. I get a lot of hospice pts who aren't tracking with concentration so providing them an Eden with lots of birdwatching is a soothing enjoyment for them. There's birdfeeders out every window and bubblers, bird baths, and fountains. Lots of songbirds! Plus we've built bungee cord "gyms" for their pleasure until all these 300+ baby trees get bigger.

I bought this house in May 2005. It was rural. Now it's suburban and in 2 years it will be urban with a gigantic shopping center going in a few blocks away with a major transportation hub (car, bus, Amtrak, light rail, multi-use paths). Portland area is experiencing a building and infill frenzy.

There's a very good group of nature shops here in the greater Portland metro regions called Backyard Birdshop. They sell anything related to birds and great yard/garden/home high-class stuff. Their seeds are fresh and reasonably priced. After trying everything, our birds have voted for the shelled black oil sunflower pieces and the pacific no waste combo -- sunflower, peanuts, millet, corn, all shelled. The finches love the niger thistle that has its own type of feeder (small holes). Also use lots of suet feeders.

Since there's so many feeders around the house the birds don't fight at crowded spots but flit to the next convenient station. The number of birds comes and goes. Right now there's a sharp-shinned hawk, sometimes a cooper hawk, that is haunting the yard so that's cutting the seed expenditure way down since the birds stay away. These hawks eat little birds.

All our feeders are made of recycled plastic lumber which looks great, like wood, good color, and never cracks chips fades splinters etc -- makes them very easy to clean. Examples from the web of 2 types we use:

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We see chickadees, an amazing variety of juncos and sparrows, lots of finches (lesser gold, American gold, house, purple, pine siskin), stellar and scrub blue jays, flocks of flickers, bushtits, varied thrush, downy woodpeckers, red-winged blackbirds, cowbirds, crows, mourning doves, black-headed grosbeaks, great blue heron, anna + rufous hummingbirds, barn swallows, nuthatches, robins, starlings when they have babies, cedar waxwings, and spotted towhees,

The yard is continually fertilized with ample amounts of guano, and we're grateful when it rains.

Cascadians, hey, I'm a hospice chaplain! Yours sounds like a lovely place to live the end of life. Is the place actually a hospice home, or do you take care of hospice patients in your own home? If so, I haven't heard of that arrangement before.

The garden is where I shed my work every day. I am concerned for myself and the inability to garden in New England winters.(This is my first paid work in hospice) Exercise is a logical alternative, but logical I don't want. I want to garden!!

Blessings on your work.
Marie aka Idabean

Hi Marie, small world, and gardening is so therapeutic for grounding sorrow and feeling the steady blessings of God. I've been a 24/7 caregiver for over 34 years, all that time going into a patient's home and doing total care until s/he either gets better or passes on. Lots of hospice pts. Also have worked in hospitals and every manner of facility. Since 1985 worked with an amazingly good husband together, but in 2004 he had a severe midlife crisis and ran off with a married woman, so my boss (since 1989) whose husband also went beserk at the same time and committed suicide, and I decided to merge our shattered lives, have fun, buy a house and fix it up to the nth degree and do 24/7 care for one patient at a time in it.

My housemate is an RN who has been the Director of a nursing facility / continuing care retirement community for over 30 years and has incredibly wonderful skills. This will be a really good place to receive optimal care. We're working on making it as close to Eden as possible ...

In the winter you can exercise with a friend, very important to keep the body moving, and studying a new subject of interest is helpful. We are determined to have fun and play wholesome games like scrabble once in a while and watch movies that make us laugh. We meditate and are disciples of Paramahansa Yogananda and yoga keeps us sane and balanced and able to keep giving to our pts.

Hospice work is very difficult and the only way I can keep doing it is to focus on the spiritual side by doing everything in my power to make my pts happy and to appreciate that indescribable free elevating ride of grace when heaven opens up to earth and one is in the powerful presence of God and His angels and that stupendous mystery of transition to the next existence.

This winter I'm going to research and draw on paper plans for 9 medium-size container "gardens" to plant in springtime. Too wet and cold to do it until April. That and pruning will have to be the gardening ...