Do you recycle?

Last night Maggie (pictured above and currently barking her head off behind me) brought something into the house. Don yelled for me to check it out, but I was a little freaked because it looked like a mouse tail hanging out of one side! Maggie has been known to bring in "gifts" the cats left us at the back door. She's also been known to carry fish to the house from the pond and has been caught carrying turtles around (always unharmed and released in a safe place).

Fortunately, she did not have a mouse. Maggie had the biggest cicada I have ever seen in my life. It was one big bug! Unfortunately, it was almost dead so I told Don to toss it into the chicken pen so someone could have it for breakfast.

You see, we're big into recycling here. Aluminum is taken to the recycling center, leftovers are fed to the critters (dogs, chickens and ducks) and other items are put in the garden compost. It's a wonderful circle, especially when the animals are involved.

The chickens and ducks eat scraps and  vegetable peels which they turn into eggs for us to eat and fertilizer for the garden, which grows food for us to eat, which in turn provides scraps and vegetable peels for the chickens, etc. The horses eat grass, which saves us gas and time to mow it. That grass is turned into fertilizer for the garden, which provides food for us and the chickens, and so forth.

Last night I cleaned out the vegetable bin in my fridge and left the bucket of old stuff on the floor. I was planning to take it out to the compost pile today, but Maggie and Caoimhe had other plans. Caoimhe has obviously convinced Maggie that over sized cucumbers are REALLY good, although I think Maggie just chewed hers up. I reached this conclusion when I saw the huge mess on the living room floor. Caoimhe, on the other hand, loves to eat cucumbers. Yes, she is a strange dog.

Now, if I could just figure out a way to recycle all the dog hair I sweep up...

In a pickle...

Recently I've found myself in a bit of a pickle or, to be more accurate, up to my elbows in pickles! For some unknown reason I planted an entire pack of cucumber seed around the scarecrow in my garden. Favorable weather conditions resulted in every single seed sprouting and every single cucumber vine to provide me with a bounty of cucumbers!

I'm not much of a cucumber eater and there's only so many cucumber slices marinated in Italian dressing that Don can eat for lunch. So, I've started making pickles. As you can see, I've canned eight pints of dill pickles and have two more pints in the fridge for snacking. Still, I have cucumbers coming out of my ears! So I'm going to put up some sweet pickles as well.

This will result in more pickles than we can eat, but perhaps I could give jars of pickles as Christmas gifts? I know one thing...Elvis and the chickens are not that fond of over sized cucumbers so I'll not put them on my Christmas pickle list!

Teddly the Garden Toad

I'd like to introduce you to Teddly, my little garden toad. A few months back I discovered him all snuggled into a nice little toad hole in my new strawberry bed (above). Unfortunately it didn't take long for some fire ants to build a big nest there also and Teddly vacated the premises.

I really missed the little guy. We had some nice chats while I was pulling weeds and preparing the garden for planting (he was a great listener). It was quite a delight to find him living under the cucumber vines recently and our afternoon chats have resumed. Mostly they consist of me promising Teddly to be careful not to step on him while I'm picking cucumbers...something I've been doing a lot lately!

Teddly isn't the only toadie in the garden. While preparing a flower bed in the front of my garden this Spring I found a very unusual toad...a small red toad with black spots and a pointed nose. I thought this type of toad only lived in rain forests! A bit of research revealed that I had found an Eastern Narrow-mouthed Toad. They are secretive (which is why I've probably never seen one before) and like to hang out in their underground burrows, which is where I found this one.

I'd found another one in the garden a year or so ago when I busted up a rotted piece of log that my frog statue sat on. It was black, but I suspect it was also an Eastern Narrow-mouthed Toad as they can change color based on their environment.

Teddly and his shy little friends are most welcome in my garden as they eat insects. Anything that helps cut down on the insects devouring my vegetable plants is going to get a hearty welcome from me!