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Just hangin' out, waiting for the gopher traps to snap!

Well, it does seem that in late August and September all the little rodents of this place begin to take over. We invested in some more Black Box gopher traps last weekend, which I am highly favorable of, and now I'm checking five traps daily with seven gophers and a handful of voles notched into my belt. They've got their own tally going too. While we were both quite busy in June and July we lost more than a couple of plants to those critters and are learning there are fewer and fewer plant roots that they won't eat. I even have a yarrow potted up struggling for survival with a few roots rescued from their gorging two nights ago.

Last spring I almost posted about my Lavender Pinocchio that a gopher killed. It was an own-root rose that Tracy didn't want to carry anymore and I have always loved the different colors it performs in our climate throughout the blooming season. I hadn't been able to walk past it in more than a week, so when I found it, the roots were totally gone and the young plant was dry and definitely dead. I took a photo of the dead plant, the gaping hole, and the "thing" that did the damage which I caught a few days later. My photo has it laying so peacefully in the garbage can on a pile of rose petals. A nice send of I say, but Tracy intervened with that post, calling it a might distasteful. I guess I'm an educator and wanted to share what we suffer with here. Besides, some people have told me that they've never seen a gopher. I suppose those people have cats that are good hunters.

So now, while I wait for the traps to snap I have a little time on my hands. To commemorate a friends' birthday and ode to Julia Child movie out right now, I made Child's Reine de Saba (Queen of Sheba) chocolate cake. Wow it was good, and even though you can only see the photos they're much better than any look at a dead gopher, for sure. I would post the steps here, but there seems to be an ongoing problem with image uploading at blogger.com. Hopefully it will be fixed soo and you can begin to drool then.

Here we go...

Well, here I am jumping on the blogging band wagon. Turns out I was blogging on our website before anyone called it blogging. I suppose this medium will expect (and create?) more verbage than my simple "What's New" part of our business site. Hard to believe anyone will even find this interesting, but perhaps during the long winters of snow or rain, when gardening only happens in people's heads and notebook planners, there might be some interest in what happens here on our 4+ acres and in our heads and notebooks, near the Redwood Forest of Humboldt County, California.