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.

There are a bunch of them out here in the suburbs of San Antonio. All dead after the string of freezes. I don't know why people think they can plunk them down and they'll live. I suppose it's because most of us are from so cal and while a lot of the same plants that grow out there do well here palms are not one of them. They look really bad dead too. Most people who have them planted them in groups of 5 or so around their pools. You can see all the dead leaves poking up high over the 6' privacy fences. Yuk!

Susan, Go out and buy some zip ties. you know, those nylon thingies you can tie stuff together with. Get them long enough to go around the fence posts (which I hope you got four off, when you got the panel). Put a fence post in the ground... by pounding on it. Tough to do by yourself, unless you have a fence post driver. I am lucky to have one. :) Then measure the distance you need for fence post number two. Should be the distance of the height of the cattle panel. Drive that one in. Now, decide how wide you like your arch. Put two more fence posts in, straight across from the first ones. Now, lay your panel so one end lines up with two fence posts. Tie the bottom to the fence posts with the zip ties. Wrestle the panel across to the other side, and tie to the bottom of the other two fence posts. Now, go ahead and put at least two more zip ties up on each fence posts attaching the panel. You can use more than three zip ties per post, but use at least three per post. I hope, my attempt of telling you how works for you. Moni