Hi! I'm originally from Wanaque, NJ (transplanted in Huntsville, Alabama). Bears generally do NOT want any part of you, but to back Dana up - they LOVE garbage. They also love fruits and berries (i.e. raspberries, blackberries, currants, so if you grow them, you might expect "company". If they are hungry - they will look for food wherever they can find it... Bears that have access to parks and state lands that are hiked by people are more "people tolerant" than "wild" bears. During mating season, when they are with their young, or just on a "Bad Hair Day", they tend to be more aggressive. As long as you stay out of their way (just don't invite them to dinner), you should be fine. Black bears don't tend to bother horses... (grizzlies are different, but you don't need to worry about that.) If you are really concerned - getting a dog will help. Bears will shy away from a dog before it will attack it. I have personally come across wild bears two different times while hiking up by Clinton Road in Northern Jersey. Once was in the summer (July) and once was in early October. Each time, the bear was by itself. Each time, I thought I "smelled" something before I actually saw the bear. (I must have been up wind from him/her.) Both times - the bear was WAY MORE FRIGHTENED of me than I was frightened of it - and it ran off with a "huffy snort". After each sighting, I started "singing" nice and loud, just to let the bear know where I was and to scare it off. (If my singing doesn't scare it - nothing will!) (smile) Lastly - bears are beautiful animals. Try reading up on them to understand them better. Knowledge is power. As people continue to encroach on their domains, wildlife will lose "wild lands". You have the opportunity to enjoy something "unique" and "fleeting". Please let us know if there are any further sightings... Meadow Lark

Love all your babies! These threads always make me smile. Our home is down one, after loosing our old man recently. He was 13yo (left). Our Lab is 12.5yo. We thought we were going to loose him two weeks ago. He has a brain tumor that causes seizures. The are usually spread a good bit apart, but he had 2 in 3 days, and looked just awful. Thank goodness he perked back up because DH was already upset about loosing his other buddy. Our #1 female dog tore her ACL and Meniscus 4 days after loosing the old man. Talk about an upset mama! Luckily she had successful surgery, sailed through her 6 weeks of crate/down time, and is working well through her 6 weeks of still being leashed. She is 7yo, but we've only had her about 2yrs. She is the sweetest dog I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. Pre-surgery pic: Post-surgery, having some out-of-crate time with me: The tiniest, but not youngest, is 10yo. She misses the old man. He was her BFF. Even the cats are getting on up there. This guy is 12yo: This guy is approximately 10yo, and we've had him 7 years.

Larry, I just hate that it is so expensive to heat a greenhouse. We had neighbors right next door to us who had a small greenhouse when I was a kid, so at least I knew the perils and pitfalls of greenhouse gardening. When we built ours, I swore I would not spend money to heat it, and I haven't, but that does mean I use it less in winter than I thought I would....and, I don't care. I'm going to make the right financial decision for us even if it isn't the fun garden decision. I still can do a lot with a greenhouse heated with natural sunlight and a large mass of water in containers. With the sort of cold we're expecting in the next couple of days, there is little one can do anyway, except try to protect edible cool-season crops with frost blanket weight row covers and such. It is just so early for all of this. Most years we don't even have our first freeze down here until well into November, often right around Thanksgiving, and it was so very early this year, around October 11 or 12 at our place. I just hope this doesn't mean we are in for a wickedly cold winter although I am afraid that's exactly what it means. I am glad your winter peas are sprouting. I expect the wildflowers will be fine. Sometimes mine sprout in fall, sometimes in spring, and we tend to get a great show of flowers either way, it is more a matter of how early or late the show is. After all, the existing wildflowers drop seeds that survive all the weather and sprout on their own with no help from us anyway. The only thing that's ever really hurt our wildflowers are the drought years, like 2011, 2008, 2005 and 2003 when the flowers burned up in the drought/heat before they could set seed. It hurt (obviously) the annual reseeding wildflowers a lot more than the perennial ones. The years I overseed the pastures with wildflowers seeds are meant to make up for years like that when the wildflower population struggles in the heat, or just because I notice that a particular area needs more wildflowers than it has had in recent years. Our native prairie grasses seem to be more aggressive growers and would force out most of the flowers if they could, so I continually counter that by sowing more wildflower seed. Jennifer, I've learned so much from Jackson Galaxy's show and it has helped me understand that for every problem cat, there's a root cause behind the problem. I think it is up to all of us (since we can't have him on speed-dial) to study our pet's situation and try to figure out what is causing the behavior they exhibit. So often it seems to be because of territorial insecurity, but then you know, every now and then there's a cat that has an underlying medical condition causing pain, so they last out at people or other animals because of their pain, or maybe PTSD because of some trauma they experienced that the pet guardian might not be aware of. I can see where it would be very hard for average pet guardians like us to figure out those tough cases. It has shocked me that there have been a few cases where they've had to put a cat on tranquilizers or some sort of prescription meds because of a mental/psychological/physiological condition they have, but why does it shock me? We have people on all kinds of medications because of brain chemistry issues. Why not cats? I hope y'all can figure out what is causing Diana to be so mean. Usually when a mother cat eats her kitten it is because something is wrong with the kitten and she is trying to protect the rest of the litter from the illness by removing it from the scene. It is hard to think about, isn't it, but it comes from an instinct to protect the group, not from meanness. I suspect Diana has a territorial insecurity issue with the dogs---she doesn't feel safe, perhaps? My solution would be to give her a place to retreat to where she's out of their reach? I'd probably buy her a tall cat tree, and maybe put up some of those elaborate cat shelves on the walls where a cat can climb for safety. (They sell them at places like Chewy's.com but a person could make their own pretty easily.) I love the one I'm going to link, but the price tag is scary. I think it wouldn't be that hard to DIY something similar though. Elaborate Cat Shelf System Our cats have no dog issues. Our dogs may bark at the cats, or may think about chasing them, but one little swipe of the cat claws across a dog's nose reminds the dog or dogs who's the boss and that is that. Sometimes, though, a cat is too afraid of the dogs to swat them with his/her claws so then the dogs think they have the upper hand. Jesse is petrified of cats because he's been clawed a couple of times but, being a puppy, he persists in trying to engage the cats in 'play'. One of these days he will learn that such engagement always ends badly for him and he'll leave the cats alone all the time, not just most of the time. This is my year off from veggie gardening so I can focus, focus, focus on the landscape renovation, even though y'all know I have to have a few peppers and tomatoes in pots or I'd lose my mind. I'm not going to raise them from seed though. I'm just going to grab a handful of plants when they arrive in the stores in March---I expect to be about ready to harvest the first fruit by the time the Spring Fling arrives, and that is why I rarely bring home tomato or pepper plants from the SF---it is too late for my location as the plants need to already by growing, blooming and producing in order to beat our wicked heat. I'm worried we are getting spoiled by the wet springs---we have been wet and mostly cool in spring since 2015 and that long run of abnormally wet, cool spring weather that persists into May or June cannot last forever. It is easy to forget that prior to 2015, we had wicked drought in 2011 through 2014 that made getting a good tomato harvest hard because it got so hot so early. Amy, The mother cat is an irresponsible, fat, lazy white thing who lives about 1/4 to 1/3 mile away from us, I believe, based on her direction of travel when she leaves our place to travel across the fields. She is showing up here every evening and every morning wanting to be fed when I feed the three big kittens (not her kittens, which are in the house) out at the garage. Yesterday she brought 3 friends with her. I fed the big kittens their canned food inside the garage and closed the door to keep the adult visitors outside, and gave them dry food. They ate it, but they weren't impressed, and they didn't act especially hungry. I think they'll stop showing up here if they cannot access the kittens' canned food. None of these are skinny or act particularly feral---I just think they probably have dry food at their homes and discovered that the kittens get canned food here at night, in particular, to lure them into the garage so they can be inside of there all night for their own safety. Because she is so large (i.e. fat) and clearly well-fed, and also because she seems to have a home, I don't understand why she had her kittens in our garage and later abandoned them twice. Perhaps she has poor mothering instincts. I do think her family (whom we do not know) have dogs, so maybe she didn't feel safe having kittens on that property---it has two homes, two families, and multiple dogs. I agree with you, Amy, about no more falling! Oh, and our skin does get thinner as we age, and I sure can tell it with my own. I'm perpetually scratched or bruised from the cats and dogs. They don't mean to hurt us, as you know, but they sure manage to do it. Nancy, You're so lucky you didn't break a bone. We go on lots of broken bone calls here....people getting thrown off horses, getting pinned to a fence or wall by a cow, falling off porches or decks or ladders or tractors or whatever. It is scary how often their overall health, especially if they are older folks, declines after a fall. Having said that, one of our neighbors got thrown off a horse on leased cattle land a few years back, and had to be brought up out of the river bottom area in the back of a pickup truck, lying in the bed on a rough ride across pastures, with a broken hip or pelvis or both.....he was 89 and his motivation to do all the proper healing and physical therapy was so he could get back on his horse and ride again. I don't know. I might have taken that injury as a sign that I should give up horseback riding myself. There is NO book on this earth that would compel me to plant hackberry trees for any reason. LOL. Our next door neighbor had them in Fort Worth, did not control them, let them reseed everywhere, and those trees grew up in our fenceline and destroyed our fence. I hate them. Oh, we have them (and sugarberries too) here in our woodland and they are aggressive and re-seed everywhere, but I'd never ever under any condition plant one on purpose because of the way they spread aggressively. Of course they feed wildlife---so does poison ivy, but I don't plant it either. If Tim and I had nothing to do with our time and energy except cut down trees, we'd cut down all the hackberries and sugarberries, and just doing that on our few acres would take the rest of our natural lives, so we'll never be rid of them but maybe we can keep them from spreading more. The ones growing on the southern edge of our woodland are moving towards my garden, year after year, creeping ever closer and that's going to cost them their lives after Tim retires one of these days. Native plants are great and we have acres of them, but one reason they survive, thrive and do so well in the first place is that often they are aggressive spreaders and growers and can take over an area. My goal as a nature-loving gardener is to have many native plants, but not too many of the super-aggressive ones that take over every square foot of space. There has to be balance. We are lucky because we never bulldozed and clear cut our property, so we don't have to restore native plants to it. There's also plenty of non-natives we perpetually work to eradicate because of their extreme aggressiveness. We also work to control natives that are aggressive spreaders. All these years of watching how the plant community members interact with each other has given me the opportunity to observe how the plants, both native and non-native, have advanced and spread ever since we bought this land way back in 1997. What have I learned? Too much to write here, but one of the big lessons is that most plants are relentless in their desire to spread and grow, and if we don't control them, the aggressive spreaders will crowd out many equally desirable (or more desirable) plants. Knowing in your mind that, logically of course, this sort of thing happens, but seeing it first-hand can be a rather shocking experience. When we first moved here, my attitude was that I would not cut down a tree for any reason because we need all the trees. Ha! I sure learned, and very quickly, how wrong I was about that. We have to cut down trees and hack back the jungle or they'd crowd us, our gardens, our house and outbuildings, and our animals right off the property. It is easy to think you'll just sit back and let the plants slug it out among themselves, but that doesn't really work either because a few aggressive species will spread so much that they hurt your property's overall biodiversity. If I never see another hackberry, sugarberry, eastern red cedar or honey locust tree on our property ever again, it will be too soon. They are here, and we'll never get rid of them, but part of our landscape reno is to cut out and remove a honey locust tree we left near the dog yard for shade, and now it and its suckers are overtaking the entire dog yard fence and need to be removed, and their suckers and stumps need to be killed with a stump/brush killer or we'll be fighting them the rest of our lives, and we don't need their thorns near the dog yard. Our native persimmons also sucker and spread as groves, and I've tried to leave them alone, but they are moving into the back garden, so they're going to be removed this winter too. Dawn

I live in what is considered one of the nicer neighborhoods in my county, but there are still a couple people who allowed totally dead blue spruces to fester in their yard for years. Finally last year, one of them realized it wasn't going to 'come back to life' and cut it down. While someone else has bumped this thread...it's been a while since I've vented my spleen. American's stewardship of our suburban or 'subrural' land is so infuriating. Leaving obviously dead trees in a yard is typical of it. I wish I'd taken more pictures in Australia along the lines of 'the is a generic street in an outer suburbs of Melbourne, notice how better kept the gardens are than an similar outer suburb of an American city'. What was particularly telling was the true farmsteads. Real blue collar places on the outermost fringes of where I traveled. I pointed out in my travelogue that sometimes the 'landscaping', such as it were, was incredibly minimalist. In a zone 10 climate where there are zillions of things you can grow, the only plants around the farm house might be a couple native gumtrees (Eucalypts) and just a few bog standard rose bushes in a simple row by the gravel drive. No 'foundation planting' to keep the simple 1 story house from flying away into outer space or whatever 'foundation planting' is supposed to do! No attempts to put on airs with plants. Yes, you might once in a while see an old run down shack or an ugly pickup truck with a snorkle LOL. (seems to be a feature AU & NZ offroading enthusiasts particularly favor) I'm not saying that it was always 'picture perfect', but that overall it felt well kept. Noticeably less areas of chaos, other than the good chaos of places like the native Victorian fern forests. Contrast with much of the mid-Atlantic, where you're going to see stuff like large areas of woodland completely overrun by hideous Celastrus or Kudzu. Or an attempt to make a very long driveway lined with an inappropriate plant like leylandii, now full of bagworms and dying branches. Just saw a place like that on the eastern shore a few days ago. Or a large, ugly unmown patch of aggressive and invasive field weeds like Horseweed and Thistle on empty lots in unzoned areas, just because someone can't bother to deal with it. (granted that's more common in 'outer suburbia' than true farmland, of course, because the farmers know to keep that crap out. I sometimes shop at one of the largest Amish farm supply stores, lit only with battery powered lights and skylights. Believe me, herbicides are one modern technology they do not eschew. They have a warehouse about as big as a bed bath and beyond full of them and other Ag chems!) It seems like Australia especially, combined the English instinct for gardening or just having a proper looking area outside a house, with a keen awareness of the dangers posed by invasives. NZ seems to have more of a problem with things like gorse, because they just don't have the human capital resources to deal with it.