by Lorraine on December 19, 2008
I wanted to follow up on my gopher story and making cages to prevent them from getting to the roots of my plants, with a rather unusual method of getting rid of the little varmints.
Last Summer when I was pursuing the plants at the Theo. Payne Foundation in Sylmar, the topic of gophers came up. My neighborhood has always had what seemed like an abundance of them plus ground squirrels, probably because I’m right next to the hills.
Frankly, I didn’ care whether or not if they were in my yard, since it wasn’t particularly lovely and certainly wouldn’t be a “featured” garden in Sunset Magazine (A fav of mine). But once the garden was in, I felt a whole lot differently about the little buggers.
A woman at the nursery told me about using chewing gum to eliminate gophers. It seems that you take a piece of gum (She suggested Wrigley’s, dunno why), chew it briefly and then place it in the gopher’s hole.
Apparently they will attempt to eat it but unfortunately, it gets stuck (I guess) in their teeth and they can’t swallow it. The outcome should be pretty obvious, isn’t it?
Wow, seems kinda cruel but I have had other people tell me the same thing. I’d really rather not do that. Maybe Sparkle will continue to catch them, that seems more normal and natural.
And yes, it’s still cold here. The water in the bird bath was frozen this morning.
by Lorraine on December 15, 2008
Southern California has the reputation of always being sunny. But that’s not entirely, true. We do have Winter here and sometimes it can be very rainy and cold. Of course, “cold” is different depending on where you live and it certainly would be considered mild here in California.
We had our first winter storm arrive and it rained steadily all night long. It’s chilly for us, in the low 50’s and I’ve heard that the snow level might be as at 2500 feet. That means to me, that the brush clearing that I just did on a trail for the Forest Service last week, is now covered in snow. Here’s a photo of the area and I’m sure that it doesn’t look like this now!
Upper Sespe Wilderness
The garden looks awesome and all of the flower seeds that I scattered in it a few weeks ago, are coming up. The bare areas between some of the plants, now have a little carpet of green sprouts and I’m wondering how it’s going to look next Spring and this rain is just what the garden needed.
I scattered a whole bunch of seeds in the backyard a couple of weeks ago. This was a lot of work to do but I couldn’t stand how crummy it looked, so I went after it with a hoe and turned almost all of the soil over and hacked my way through the patches of Bermuda lawn, too.
Backyard
I’m wondering where I got the energy to do this, since the day before I had been doing brush clearing along a trail in the Sespe Wilderness. But I really wanted to get this done before I missed the winter rains. It’s not perfect, no landscaping or walkways or other things to make it beautiful but it will certainly look better than it does now.
I’m really looking forward to see what happens in the next few weeks. With the rain and some sunny days, the backyard should end up looking amazing next year.
