So glad that Hissy has found a good temporary home. I've always loved snakes and have had them as pets since I was a child. Later, when I was in grad school and living in an apartment just off campus, my much younger brother brought a rat snake home from scout camp. Unfortunately, my father, who was terrified of snakes, announced that either the snake went or he would go, so naturally I took him off my brother's hands and installed him in a nice herpetarium in my apartment (at which point I discovered just who my friends were and weren't!) Kaa (as I named him, from Kipling of course) stayed with me until I had to move to another location, at which point I found a new home for him.I would love to have a snake pet again, but now I'm in a New York City apartment and haven't the room it would need. I'm hoping that Hissy will find a wonderful new home. Thanks to you for being so kind in rescuing him even though you weren't familiar with snakes!

Thanks so far for the pointers...I actually made a mistake in my original post about the 3-foot diameter hole - it's actually a 3-foot RADIUS, so I should've said 6-foot diameter hole (with no grass underneath, just good soil and mulch). Given this fact, would you say it is still considered a "lawn tree"? I don't plan on allowing the tree to get too big to where it will shade the lawn that much. It is near a wall that separates our yard from the neighbors, so I will need to prune it so that it doesn't hang over into our neighbor's yard (don't worry, we buried plastic along the wall side so that the roots can't pass through and destroy the wall...hopefully it will send the roots deeper down, as opposed to staying near the surface). Hoov - you're a genius. I've been trying to think of a way I could provide shade until the head passes...I didn't even think about putting a patio umbrella there....good thinking! As for the time of year it was planted, Sunset magazine actually recommends that May and June are the ideal times of year to plant avocados. I snuck right in that window by planting it the last week of June. That's the main reason why I chose this time of year.

Bird dogs are notorious for being able to scent rattlesnakes. I grew up in a bird hunting family, dove, quail and turkeys and I can tell you there's nothing more sickening than having a bird dog on point when quail hunting, and NOT flushing any quail...then you SLOWLY start looking for the rattlesnake, and hope you don't get snakebit. Fortunately for us none of us did suffer but we did kill some really BIG rattlesnakes back then. Not much of an issue here in the burbs now, but being on a brackish lake I do get those d**n moccasins and I do remember the time I almost lost a good bird dog to a moccasin strike to the head, unfortunately they don't scent these snakes. It was a really dry year and the moccasins were coming out of the cypress swamps searching for any water to survive.... Tom

I like snakes. If they are poisonous I just stay away from them as much as possible. We have had to move 6 ft black snakes away from the chicken coop. One evening when I went to lock up the chickens, they were all standing out in the run and would not go into the coop...strange! So I go in there and there is a huge black snake in there. I got dh to go get a shovel and pick it up and move it out into the woods. A different time I found one in a nest box devouring eggs. My dd had a king snake for a few years. She eventually got bored of it and sold it to the kid down the street who had been visiting it every day for about 6 mos. He still has it. Does anyone have Nile Monitor lizards around their property? I have been seeing a lot of stuff on the news lately on how they are overpopulating and eating people's cats!