Gophers.... We spent months setting traps last year trying to get our one gopher. Dad had put a poured concrete walk from the side of the house, around back and on down to the gate for the lower garden (fruit trees-veggies-chickens) This beast had tunneled over from the neighbors brick pile to the safety of the walkway. Plants would up and die and by the size of the hole, we knew who did it. Mom finally got it, it was almost too fat to fit in the trap! We put in a row of society garlic this year to try and keep any relatives on the other side of the fence. No sooner than I put in the new roses and guess what we saw.... The beast had dug its hole up to the new row of garlic, walked through it and made a new hole on our side of the fence! The ground had all been turned and composted horse manure added, so this time it left a mound everywhere is it going. And, it even made it down to the main garden! I have more gopher peanuts, gopher traps etc out there. We were painting a section of picket fence and what goes wandering practically over our feet....the mini Beast! I was not fast enough grabbing a shovel and giving chase. Half an hour later....guess who came wandering back by to its hole on the other side of the fence! Arrrgggg I would smoke them out, but the mounds are so close to the surface, I think the only ones smoked out would be us.

Hi Sandy, do you have a pic of your contraption? And this may sound silly but what species is a gopher? Do they dig the roots of your plants or do they eat the plants? We have "woodchucks" here which are also sometimes called ground hogs and gophers. I used to battle them in my veggie garden at the previous house. The thing that works best is having a dog. Next, a gun. But since I have neither of those, I use barriers - mostly fencing and caging on the plants that they like. Last year i started using hardware cloth around the roots of the perennials that the voles like best - Echinacea, Phlox, Savlia Black & Blue, etc. That works well and so does the castor oil.

I love your picture!!! We live in So. Calif. have a lake near our house and sometimes I see a Great Blue Heron...takes my breath away when they fly across the lake. A few weeks ago a great blue landed in my almost empty swimming pool...he flew up a little into some branches and sat there looking right at me!!! He finally flew up and over me. I'll never forget how he stayed and kept looking at me.

The concept of warm and cool colors predates most of the scientific tools we have today to measure color. It originated from the concept of warmth vs cold. the Oxford English Dictionary describes 18th century usage to include: Cold - applied to tints or colouring which suggest a cold sunless day, or the colder effect of evening; esp. to blue and grey, and tints akin to these. Warm - suggestive of warmth, said especially of red or yellow ... to become 'warmer' or more ruddy: "On a bright morning of July, when the grey of the sky was just beginning to warm with the rising day". I always conceptualized the concept as warm-related to the heat of the sun or cool of the water. The scientific difference deals with the sensitivity of the S cone. I am not a neuro science expert, but it has something to do with thresholds of the S cone and how colors change as they are desaturated. Blue goes from blue to darker and darker blue, but we still perceive the color as blue and we name the colors as blue light blue, sky blue, navy blue. When we change the chroma Blue goes from bright blue to gray blue. You can't do the same with yellow. We only see yellow in very specific ranges of light and chroma. We call dark yellow gold or brown and as we desaturate yellow it can either move toward green or violet. At the lowest saturations there isn't any yellow or orange or red. Have you ever heard someone describe a gray as a dark yellow gray? Nope. Beige can be pink, yellow, gold or green and gray can be green gray, blue gray or violet gray. So when the hue is yellow and it is desaturated it becomes olive green or brown - moves toward red or toward green it never stays yellow. At some point it moves to either a green gray or violet gray and looses any association with yellow. Grays are innately cool. - related to water, not the sun. Do you ever picture the sun as gray? Do you ever picture water as yellow? Where is the break between cool and warm? At what level of chroma do we determine that a yellow is no longer warm, but has moved into the cool zone? That may actually depend on your physiology - some people see more colors than other and can discern subtle changes in color better than others. It may also depend on the levels of dopamine in your system - we see colors more vividly when dopamine levels are high than we do when dopamine levels are low. I don't know if their is a definitive answer to your question about Chantilly Lace. Is it above or below the S cone threshold? It seems that the color experts at Benjamin Moore agree with many other color experts and define it as a cool white so my guess is that it is beyond the threshold of chroma where we actually perceive the color as warm even if it is in a CIE LCH hue that is generally associated with the Munsell Yellow Green hue family. BTW - CIE LCH Is linear in nature, where Munsell is not. The Muncell hues curve when mapped against LCH hues. The curvature expands as chroma and luminance are reduced. How we see color and how we measure color are not perfectly correlated.