Oh Trust me it was a copperhead and they dearly love these iron ore rocks to hid under and around. IT's head was triangle in shape. Wayne I'm scared to death of any snake so as far as I'm concerned they are all DEADLY. Most things I can handles but not SNAKES. Seems there is an abundance of them everywhere this spring. My big pond is full of watermossicans. This is the very first year I've seen any at all in or around the pond. While watching for beavers a couple of weeks ago I spotted the first one which was huge. Then the more I looked around they were all over the place on the farside/ back side of the pond. Needless to say I'll not be going over there any more either. I tried to shoot a couple of them but my eye site is not what it use to be and I can't hold the gun very steady either. LOL I have been thinking about putting some water plants and stuff in there on the backside of the pond. Instead I just took a bunch of siberian iris seeds and sprinkled them on the neat,clean mowed side of the pond. LOL Yelp, ya'll can call me CHICKEN. Anyway, I'm staying clear of snakey looking places on this property for now. Happy Gardening and watching for snakes my friends. Hey Kristy, I don't think it's ugle out of you to toss those snakes back into your neighbors yard. Just make sure you don't pick up and toss a deadly one back over there. It might bite you. LOL Maybe I'll find one of those poles with a rope attacthed and start catching them and sending them to Karyn since she likes them so much. LOL Only problem with that is I'd have to figure out how to get the rope off of them and I'd probably get bitten in the process.(smile) Marian

My back garden is sort of a bird sanctuary - we have lots of tall trees and bushes, 4 bird baths, and I put out bird seed. Zillions of little song birds. Also crows. I feed them (the crows) peanuts, which they love. Each morning they gather and start calling, until I get up to feed them. After they got used to me, I occasionally get what I call "chuckled" at - the soft noise they make to their babies, very different from their normal caws. I saw a film on TV where scientists did experiments and determined that crows can recognize individual human faces. My brother told me to make that clicking noise which you can make out the side of your mouth to them - now if I go out with peanuts and there are no crows, I do that, and they show up within about 45 seconds. They are very intelligent and I love having them around. If a hawk comes close to one of their nests in the tall trees around here, they put out a "calling all crows" noise for help, and crows show up from all points of the compass - within a few minutes there are dozens of them harassing the hawk until it leaves. So, I would pay attention to your crows, and you will learn about them and be entertained! Jackie

Dorothy, You are such a better country woman than I ever will be. I cannot bear to even look at a snake much less stand close enough to chop one with a hoe. We have lots of black snakes and the first few years we tried to tolerate them because they control rodents. Once they started wrapped themselves around our little keats and chicks and squeezing them to death, we stopped tolerating them. We see them a lot more than we see actual chicken snakes. Among the venomous snakes, I see Timber Rattlers (commonly called velvet-tail rattlers here) more than I see anything else, although I see a lot of copperheads too. We've always had lots of non-venomous water snakes but the last three years we've had cottonmouths in the lily pond. I am just about done with the lily pond for that reason and think more and more of filling it in. I'd miss the water lilies but I wouldn't miss the cottonmouths. Helen, Between our house and the Red River to our west there is one old farm/ranch. It is used mostly as a weekend place now by one of the adult children who grew up there. He has so many copperheads on his property at night that he says when he sits on his front porch at night and shines a flashlight into the yard, there will be this huge amount of snake eyes looking back at him. He just sits there on the porch and shoots them, but no matter how many he kills, more of them just keep coming. Larry, He surely did kept his wonderful sense of humor, didn't he. Dawn

Sansevieria are supposed to be summer-dormant plants, i.e., they do most of their growing in fall, spring, and winter as an adaptation to the harsh summer conditions in their native habitat. Changes in day or night length are the normal triggers to go in or out of dormancy (and to flower, etc.) However, despite this scientific fact, I read a lot about people's Sans growing the most during the summer (or at least spring and fall). My hypothesis is that cool in-home temperatures slow down the chemical reactions and biological processes of heat-loving Sans so much that they are unable to grow during their normal, natural growing period when kept as potted house plants, and that's why so many people report the greatest growth during the warmer months of the year. A rhizome is just an underground stem. Pups are just leaves on an underground stem, or new "branch", so that's how you can treat them. With most Sans, the whole plant is underground except the leaves. You might be able to deal with the water-retentive media by watering with a high pressure squirt bottle. Some people here are going to hiss at me, but it's a "cheater's" method for keeping moisture-intolerant plants healthy in water-retentive soil. I've kept plants that way for years. Get a squirt bottle or squirt gun with a very strong single stream (those squirt ends for outdoor herbacides and pesticides are good - cleaned WELL of course). Place the tip on the soil, point it down toward the roots, and fire. Do it all around the plant so there are roughly evenly spaced wet streaks in the otherwise pretty dry soil. If the stream is good enough, it'll squirt several inches into the medium. This prevents the dreaded "perched water" near the bottom of the pot where rot usually starts. In media like peat, those wet streaks inside the pot disperse into damp columns. If you pay attention, you can alter your shots each watering so you do dampen almost all the soil over several weeks so it is never all wet at the same time, but every part gets damp at different times. It is an excellent method for the hopeless over-waterer who just can't resist the urge to give a plant a drink. You get to mess with your plant all the time without killing it. You can even squirt a little water up through the drain holes, or with plastic pots, you can stick holes in the side with a hot nail just for this purpose. It works. You CAN even over-water with this method, but you're less likely too. Don't tell on me, but I'm maintaining several plants this way right now.