I'm with you Pam. I admire and conserve the snakes on our property. They're a wonderful indicator of good ecological stewardship and for the most part are harmless. You have to really work at getting bit by even our poisonous ones, they'd rather hide than attack. BTW, poisonous snakes are very endangered here, and our part of the state is about the only place where the copperheads are still plentiful. Habitat loss is one factor, but the human propensity to just slaughter them on site out of ignorance has been the leading cause. We have had many types of snakes up near the house/in the house. The most common would be the garter, and the second one not far behind the black rat snake. One of them lives in our cellar, in fact. We don't see him/her every time we go down there, but when we do, it's like finding Elmo. It may be laying in a coil, pretending to be a hose, curled up in a gap in the stones of the walls, and even stretched out pretending to be a shovel handle. The last time we saw it, the dh almost picked it up for a tool. LOL. Now, I've not measured it, but it's somewhere between four and five feet long. You know how snakes are, they're like the fish who get away. They get longer each time you recount the story. We replaced the very, very old wooden tongue in grove door from the outside (with large gaping holes in it) with a modern metal one several years ago, and I was sore afraid that we would trap the poor reptile either inside or outside stranding it. We didn't even have the installation completely down when she slithered down the grass near the door and began trying to squeeze into the cellar. I was crushed as the only gape is a minute space where the old wooden jamb meets the stone foundation. I came back several times to check and by God, she was halfway in..somehow flattening her body out and forcing it through. Fearing she'd be stuck I checked again. She made it. The answer is NO, having a five foot snake in my cellar does not bother me. She eats rodents. I'd rather have her in there than a rat or mice, and she gets a warmer place to spend her winters, and a cool place to summer.

Oh, man. I wish I had snakes. Occasionally I see a black snake and get all happy. I have so many moles and voles that they've pushed up my flagstones and walking on the yard is an exercise in ankle strain. I admit to using Grub-X, but while the grass (non-mole spots) are looking like grass, evidently the moles and voles have something else to live on. I have a good snake story, though. I have this one area where even though I stomp on the mole trails, they redig them into a raised bed. I keep moving plants away from their trail, but inevitably they end up under this one heuchera. One day, I was standing in the yard talking on the phone. I saw something dark move near the heuchera, and couldn't figure it out. I thought it might be a hurt mouse or something. I don't know why I didn't think mole. Anyway, upon closer inspection, it was a snake backing into the mole trail away from me. He'd found a little smorgasboard. Unfortunately, he must have gotten full and left, because the moles are more than ever. But it was so cool to find this snake doing his think in the garden! I like snakes. Not big on spiders, but I like snakes. C.

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: 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.

Catherine, thanks! What about spraying individual sick plants or hitting individual weeds with roundup? That's my normal method. I use an organic gardening stuff for my lawn -- is that okay? Unfortunately we have a mowing service, and they ride around at top speed on those huge mowers. There are sections of the yard that aren't mowed, though. I could possibly add a water feature in one of those areas. Re: the water feature. Would one that isn't in the ground be of any help? One of those ponds-that-are-actually-a-tub-of-water-that-stands-on-the-deck kind of things? Or does it need to be something the toads can hop into and out of and such, something at ground level? What about garter snakes? Are the two mutually exclusive? Val