We're still very, very busy in my garden as I always try to do too much. The pear and apple trees are loaded with fruit despite the fact they have shared fire blight. Mr. Man had to cut back some of the limbs that were breaking due to the heavy weight of the pears. He also cut back the limbs most affected by the fire blight. The grapefruit and Meyer lemon have lots of fruit for the first year. Yesterday we ate the three peaches that were on the peach tree. When we bit in they were so juicy that the juice shot out all over our faces, hands and shirts. Aahhh, to have to wait another year for more of these delicious peaches. Lost 5 citrus trees that were leafing out this spring. Just planted them in the fall. Had a late 32 degree night. Didn't cover them with a frost blanket as I had during the winter thinking it wasn't going to be cold enough to hurt them. Wrong. The kumquat is just beginning to set fruit and it looks like it is going to be a bumper year for this tree. If I can just keep my grands from picking them this year. I can always tell which grand picks this tree as to how high from the ground the fruit is gone. The pecan trees actually have pecans...the first time in 3-4 years. Again, thanks to the hurricanes. The Concord grape vines are absolutely loaded with grapes despite the fact that the County Extension agent says Concord grapes will not grow under any circumstances in our area. I'm not going to tell the grapes this as this is their 8th year and third transplant later. (Note to Self: Take a pic and pick some grapes to put on his desk as soon as they are ripe.) The tomato plants look downright pityful. Guess didn't get enough water when they needed it, bless their hearts. The hyacinth beans are getting large enough that Christian and the grands are going to help me make their teepee today with the vines. Tiny, tiny frogs are jumping all over the rocks around the pond. Still quite a few tadpoles in the pond. Cleaned out the kid's swimming pool for the second time this summer as the pump went out and had to find a new one that fit. There must have been a gazillion large tadpoles in the pool squiggling and wiggling all around Mr. Man's feet while he was cleaning it out. Thank God for this man...don't know that I could have done it. Missed the time to trim back my roses before their first big burst of bloom. Just trimmed them back. Hopefully, this won't harm them too much. Almost finished with my new daylily bed a friend has been helping me design and plant. This has been a major project as we killed all grass and weeds this spring, put down an irrigation system, put down four layers of newspaper, cut open 280 brown paper bags I purchased fromt the local grocery and put over the newspaper, and then put down 32 bails of pinestraw, in hopes of controlling the weeds and water conservation. We are now on 'phase 3'...putting in the walkway. This has been planned since before Katrina and is FINALLY coming to life. Friends all over have been giving me daylilies for this bed and all but about a dozen have been planted. The clome volunteers are now about 3-4 feet high in this bed and look so pretty. I just love this little plants...like the Everready battery, they just keep going and going. Have transplanted some herbs from the destroyed herb bed (thanks Katrina) to the new Fairy Garden that we made last fall around the little pond. Now need to mow down the herbs that I'm not going to transplant. Now, need to start concentrating on getting the other countless plants-in-pots in the ground.

Pretty birds. I see downy woodpeckers fairly often but hardly ever see the bigger woodpeckers. Our little Chloe is still jumping up in the air trying to catch every bird or airplane that she sees. I was hoping she would outgrow that. I don't think she's ever caught anything but I get tired of hearing her bark at them. I moved my bird feeder out of the back yard away from the dogs. I liked it better where it WAS because I could see the feeder and birds through my bay window from the kitchen. Now it's more out of the way but the birds will have some peace. I still need to hang my finch feeder.

We just had our first grosbeak in three Springs, too! A fine, fat male sat right on the Droll Yankee feeder next to the French doors for a good ten minutes... We've also seen lots of goldfinches, house finches, the usual downy, hairy, red-bellied woodpeckers and flickers, but we're noticing rather unusual sparrows (chipping, song, black-throated...)and some great blue herons are using us as a flyway, too. Oh, and a pair of wood ducks visited the silver maples a while back--it was funny watching them wobble on the branches, trying to perch! Dh thinks he saw bluebirds in the fields over the weekend, too. The STRANGEST thing we've seen since moving here was last year, when a flock of what turned out to be AFRICAN CATTLE EGRETS (!!!!) grazed the fields for a few days. Becky

Thank you Pat, I appriciate that! The pictures dont do a lot just sitting on my computer, they aren't worth taking if I can't share them! I'm grateful to be able to share what I can with you all! I used to hunt geese and ducks, and still hunt rabbits. Mostly to keep them out of my garden, but I have a rule about only killing things you intend to eat so they end up on the menu at our house. I don't have any issue with legal and ethical hunting and I know there are quite a few people who hunt cranes. They say it is the filet mignon of the sky. I would probably try it if somone served it to me but some animals I really just can't imagine killing myself. I would never shoot a crane, even if I did intend to eat it. Rabbit suits me just fine. 40,000 is a LOT of cranes! Hiw very awesome to have seen that many! We get flocks of just a few to may up to 30-40 here at our house in north-central Colorado. The really big flocks are, like I said, further east in Nebraska and southwest in the mountain valleys and out on the western side of the State. Every few years, if our wetlands are full, the cranes land at work and spend a few days, usually on their southward fall migration. I think whooping cranes have been reported in the Nebraska flocks, but they are hard to find with their habit of migrating as small family groups and their much smaller population size (I think they are up to around 350 indeviduals now. Considering they were down to just a handful, thats a pretty amazing success though!). At one time they attempted to integrate whooper chicks with the sandhill flocks to help with recovery. But they found that once they matured, they thought they were sandhills and wouldn't mate with the other whoopers! Beautiful shot, Catherine! It reminds me of what Aldo Leopold once wrote: "one swallow does not make a summer. But a skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw is the spring."