Hi kathy, sorry for my delay in my response, I have been so over whelmed with excitement with all the stuff I've received I told my wife I don't know where to start or finish. She told me just start at one corner and go around the yard. Lol.. I am really excited tho I've gone to H/D to get soil,.perlite and now I can start filling pots and making more cacti & succulent projects :) Kathy so this greyish colored plant, is it easily propagated by cuttings the and what are the watering trixs? & does it like full sun or bright light? And thank you for your experience too, its much appreciated. Rosemarie, thanks again as always, your help with the plants names is invaluable. This last picture is a nice wheel barrel pot carrier that also was part of the load, of can't wait to get all settled in there is just so many pots and other goodies I haven't even posted half of um. Greg

Go back and read the titles and descriptions and you'll find out. ;) I can't give you the answer because it will give it away for everyone else. That turtle goes all over my place. I find him up in the potager and way up in the statue garden too. He gets around! Here's a picture of another Ornate Box Turtle that frequented my place several years ago: Same species, but with the yellow head instead of black and orange. I think he is very pretty! You can tell this one is a male - he has orange eyes. Females have yellow to brown colored eyes. I took a series of photos of this turtle, too. My big fluffy gray Tabby, "Puddy Tat", was very intrigued by him. as was my dog, Mike. I got quite a number of very cute pictures of them. I can post them if anyone is interested in seeing them. We have another land turtle too. It is called, "Three-toed Turtle", for obvious reasons. Only three toes on each foot. They do not have the pretty colors or patterns on their shells - kind of mulkety-dung-green-brown, like the color of an army helmet. Think of an army helmet with legs, a head and a skinny little short tail, and you pretty much have it! (hehehe) My close-encounters with the wildlife are part of what I enjoy most about working in my gardens. ~Annie

Glenda, I would be suspicious of your "little brown banty"...my hens LOVE cabbages and eat the tops out of them. They also love tomatoes and are known to steal strawberries, too. They beat me to ALL the strawberries this year. :) I grew ten cabbages - we will consume only two (in a year) unless I make Sauerkraut (sourkraut), so I "allowed" them to eat two or three and they left the others alone. That does not always work. Sometimes they take bites out of every one they find. Depends on the number of chickens I have. When the flock is large, only fencing them out will solve the problem. In gangs, they become total punks! Of course, I shoo them out every time I see them chomping on the cabbage - you can't let the kids know you are not in complete control of things - so those two cabbages became their forbidden fruit. I give them everything I clean out of the garden. I toss it is their run and they compost it for me. :) Now, there are various schools of thought on whether to allow chickens to eat stuff from the garden or not. One thought is that if you give them a tomato they develop a taste for them and will be more likely to rob your garden. Another thought, (mine) is that foods that are within their dietary range are going to be fair game regardless of whether they have ever tasted one from your garden or not. They crave what they need, just like every other species on this planet, including us. (we of course are the ONLY species that consumes things that are deadly and/or makes us sick - and obviously the superior species on this planet. Uh hum! Anyway, I bet your little thief is your Banty chicken. During drought, wild birds will eat tomatoes too, but with the cabbage, I would venture to guess that it is your chicken. Tomato cages (the round wire basket-type) with extra netting or chicken wire added around the bottom will help. They work for cabbages too. (wink wink) schoolhouse, I had a black lab years ago, named Little Elmo (MoMo for short). One summer, he took it upon himself to collect Box Turtles. We ended up with well over fifty box turtles that Elmo brought home to me. THAT is a story in itself: "The Adventures of Little Elmo and the Box Turtles". What a cute dog! He was the same dog that some of you might recall me telling you about who as a pup had a pink puppy pacifier tied to his collar. We fed the turtles soggy dog food and June bugs and lettuce from the garden and of course tomatoes or whatever was on the turtle menu for the day. I built them a pen in an old bottomless swimming pool frame over the builder's sand pile left from the construction of my house. In the sand, I built a sunken drinking pool (a shallow plate) so they had access to water. They would dig down in the sand or climb to the top and look around, blinking. My kids watched them for hours, laughing and laughing. One half of the pen was on solid ground and there was grass, too. It was partially in filtered shade all day. The kids and I (and "itto MoMo") watched them for about a month and then we released them back into the wild. Some stayed around but most went back to their natal habitats. We learned a lot about Box Turtles in that month. I raised my children back in the day to observe, enjoy and protect all wildlife. They still do... OBTW - We also discovered that Box Turtles love peaches... ~Annie "Blow up your TV, throw away your paper; Go to the country, build you a home. Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches; Try an find Jesus, on your own." "(I) blew up our TV; threw away our paper; Went to the country, built (me) a home. Had a lot of children, fed 'em on peaches. They all found Jesus, on their own." - John Prine

Several years ago a male Painted Bunting bathed in the birdbath, but I haven't seen one since. See Indigo Buntings most summers--none yet this year. The last two years I saw both an Oriol and a Rosebreasted Grosbeak visit my feeder for a few days in the spring, but so far not this year either. The Goldfinches are now in their lovely black and yellow summer dress. And there is a phoebe nesting under the eave of the storage shed as there has been for almost every summer for 30 years. I love to watch the birds.