Last year I had gater snakes everywhere. This year I have not seen a single one. I'd run to the store and get garter snake attractant but it would most likely back fire and bring in deer to eat everything. Seriously, I would like to know why they are staying away this year as I still see plenty of sign their food is not in short supply here. I might even have gained a gopher from the looks of things.

These plants make thick stands in the wild; I've seen one plant-borg cover hundreds of square feet. The plant has a fragile stem, and appears to be specially designed to break off at the top of the root - I discovered that I had to be careful when digging wild plants, or I'd just end up with a stem with a white end. If you can loosen below with a long spade, you're much more likely to get the root. Unfortunately, if your soil is tough to dig them out of, it's just going to be a game of attrition. If you keep pulling and/or poisoning the young shoots, it will wear out the roots. But it's not an easy game to win. Here is a link that might be useful: Link to my blog entry about Passiflora incarnata - wildcrafting and jelly making

I have tried the traps. It looks like they are called "Macabee traps" and an organic rancher I know uses lots of them in his hay and pasture land. Well, he has lots of experience and land. I've got a garden to protect. Success escaped me ... and so did the gopher that season. I should admit that gophers don't show up often in my garden. Voles are more common but a coyote or a neighborhood Tom cat is usually how I become aware of the voles. There was one notable exception with the plague of voles I had trying to grow potatoes under hay, one year! Anyway, ground squirrels, marmots and gophers have all been "dealt with" through harassment. I may even have killed them by making their lives difficult but it's probably more likely that they just moved on. Ground squirrels and marmots, I've gone after with a sledgehammer! A block of wood helps and my gardens always have plenty of rocks about the same size as the burrows of these pests! Three or 4 rocks driven into every burrow that i can find - one rock after another, and as deep as I can drive them - can seal the burrow. They have gotten the message that they are not welcome and didn't return. Gophers don't have burrows like the others. They seem much more shallow. Their activities seem to be in a fairly small area. Okay, I can use a smaller hammer and find a metal rod. I can spend 20 or 30 minutes driving that rod everywhere within about 25 square feet and, likely, at every depth the gopher might have gone. Destruction to his tunnel must be extensive if I didn't actually impale the pest. As I say, this has apparently gotten the unwelcome message across and the gopher has departed. I hope that helps. Steve

Bon, Aren't they awful this year? And whatever species is around down here right now is huge. I mean, they aren't big like craneflies, but they are a lot bigger than the average mosquito. I understand that Dallas County, TX, where Tim and Chris work of course, already has confirmed 3 cases of West Nile Virus in mosquitoes trapped and tested as a means of early disease detection. They often detect the virus in trapped mosquitoes long before any human cases occur, but it still bothers me that they are detecting it so early there. That means it is only 80 miles SE of our county, if not closer. Nancy, I hope your luck with the mosquitoes holds. The population here seems to explode when we start hitting temperatures in the 80s and have had recent or fairly recent rainfall. Some years it surprises me how slow they are to show up, but we had them all winter long without ceasing, so I'm not surprised the population is high now. They may spray around the lake, but that only does so much good. At some point, they cannot spray enough to get them all, so enjoy it for however long it lasts! Yes, we have had both dogs and cats bitten by venomous snakes. Most survived. I am glad your dog did survive it. Only a couple of our pets were sick enough to require a trip to the vet. Cats are less likely to survive than large dogs. We have one cat, Shady, who was bitten by a copperhead about 12 or 13 years ago. He developed the copper-colored rash and the whole nine yards, and still has a scar where the rash appeared. Another cat, Ranger, was bitten in the face and partially paralyzed. We took her to the vet and ran up big bills to save her, and it was worth every nickle. Even after the vet finally took her off the IV and let her come home after about a week of his skilled intensive care, her eyes were paralyzed open for weeks, and he still wasn't sure if the paralysis would heal, though he thought it would. She slept by creeping into a dark corner of the closet and burying her head in the darkest spot she could find. She's fully back to normal now. Honestly, I did not expect her to survive. Our now-deceased cat, Spots, was bitten twice, several years apart. The vet was surprised she survived the first time and said a second venomous bite likely would kill her. It didn't. She died about a decade later of old-age related issues. Our Rottweiler-Terrier mix, Duke, who passed away last year at the age of 12, took a direct hit to the face from a timber rattler around 2008 and should not have survived that. Tim was at a wreck on the interstate and I sent him a frantic text message because it was a Sunday evening and I knew a vet wasn't a viable option. Duke started going into shock, so I sat on the ground and held him upright. Tim said if I let him go down on the ground, we'd likely lose him. As soon as Tim got home, he broke out the Benadryl tablets, crushed up a couple, dissolved them in water and forced them down Duke's throat with a syringe. By then, Duke was panting heavily and was glassy-eyed. Within maybe 30 minutes of receiving the Benadryl, the swelling in his face went down and he seemed fine, and I was finally able to let go of him after having held him upright (he weighed 110 lbs.) for about 90 minutes. Ever since then, we have kept a bottle of the Children's Benadryl in the medicine cabinet in case a dog needs it again. With Duke, the snake struck him on the side of his snout, near his nose, which is a fairly bony area, which may have saved Duke's life, as it may have kept some of the venom from making it into his bloodstream. People tend to have a very strong reaction to a bite from a timber rattler, so I didn't have high hopes when I saw that snake scurrying away from Duke and knew that was what had just bitten him. A lot of people think they'll just take the pet to the vet and he or she will give it antivenin and all will be well, which isn't really likely. Using antivenin is cost-prohibitive, and not even guaranteed to work. Sometimes, a reaction to it can be worse than the original snakebite, and you never know how someone, animal or human, will react to the antivenin. We have lost two cats to snakebites, both in our very early years here. Except for my garden and the chicken coop areas, we don't have as many snakes around the house as we used to, and we haven't had a cat or dog bitten by a snake now in several years. I hope our luck holds. In Duke's case, he was bitten near our front driveway gate. For several years after that, he would't walk near that gate. In fact, he'd make a big wide circle around if when he was on the leash and we were going for a walk. He had a very long memory of what happened to him there. In Duke's case, we had just returned from a walk and I took him off the leash to let him walk freely up the driveway. Apparently he stopped to pee on the gate, and the snake suddenly struck him. Neither he nor I saw the snake until it bit him. He didn't even like waterhoses after that, so I know he never forgot. When Spots was bitten the first time, we'd lived here only a few months and knew nothing about pets being snakebitten. We called our next door neighbor and he told us that his mother always saved snakebitten animals by feeding them a raw egg mixed with bacon grease. I tried that and Spots wouldn't eat it, so we took her to the vet, who basically said "either she'll make it or she won't" and explained about the use of antivenin, which he does not recommend. The second time we just called him and he said "either she'll make it or she won't". lol. These old country vets don't get as excited about snake bites as we humans do. Our current vet is a group practice which has a cat specialist on its staff and he is a miracle worker with snake bites. We really didn't think Ranger would make it, but he was willing to try to save her, so how could we say no to that? She's a very sweet cat and a perfect companion. We didn't see her get bitten so don't know how it happened, but all our cats seem to know to avoid snakes. I don't want to know how they learned that. Dawn