My Garden of Eden

When standing on my back patio this is the scenery I enjoy. The white "thing" to the right of this picture is a bird house condo Leon got for me last fall. Right now, we are having 75% occupancy. The water feature in the midde is an old cattle stock tank set up with an old fashioned hand operated pump. We have a circulating pump set up for water to flow thru it 24/7. Well, we have to unplug in the winter months so it won't freeze. It is so delightful to be able to hear the water running when ever I am in the back yard. Surrounding the tank is a variety of items - such as wagon wheels, buckets, tractor seat and misc. hand tools (all very old). We have added some large rocks to add to the scene. The huge cowboy boot was an addition I put in last year. When I saw it I knew I had to have it for this area. It weighs about 75 pounds - so had to wait until Leon could go with me to get it.

We have many visitors in our yard---referring to many birds- such as: red headed woodpecker, wren, goldfinch, cardinals, blue birds, hummingbirds, blue-jays, red-winged black bird, quail, dove, and several species of sparrows. I know there are other birds - but I can not identify them. The geese and ducks have not been around for several days - I suppose they are off visiting else where. Additionally we have squirrels and rabbits. Right now we have two baby-baby cotton tail bunnies nesting under part of the patio. All these I see during the day light hours - as to what all comes in during the night is a good guess...probably raccoons. armadillos and yes a skunk which I saw the other morning when getting my newspaper. I do not allow snakes in my yard. I don't care if they are poisonous or not. I can not stand them! Three snakes have met their demise within the last four weeks. Leon shot one and I killed the other two with a shovel. They were about 3 to 3 1/2 feet long and about the size of a lemon at their largest part.

My Garden of Eden has many flowers - which take a lot of work to keep the grass and weeds pulled...plus all the watering. I do enjoy them so much. I told Leon the other day I was not going to put out any more flowers this year - but that did not last long. This past Saturday I mentioned how pretty the ornamental grasses are in a particular yard. He said, "We will stop by Home Depot after we leave Max's birthday party and see what they have". So we did stop and I bought one. We put it out front near a large rock (look for a picture in a future post). Did I stop there in getting more flowers - no I didn't. I got two tropical hibiscus (One yellow and one orange), an asparagus fern and a deep red day lilly. We got these new additions planted yesterday.