Deer Buffet!

Happy Saturday friends!

I was talking with someone recently and feeling exasperated about the deer on the farm and how, even with acres of naturally delicious deer treats, they insist on coming to my front beds along the house and devouring hostas, hydrangeas, day lily, purple cone flower, and pansies! Only the pansies were blooming, everything else in these two beds have just been trying to leaf out. The day lilies and pansies? Literally yanked right out of the ground.

Heathens.

I said, "I feel like one day I'm going to walk out my front door and find them bedded down on my front porch!"

Of course that made me laugh and I had to paint it! See the chomped hostas in the foreground :-/ See the hosta leaf sticking out of the first deer's mouth?? Argh. This is life in the jungly south. They better hurry up and show me their spotty babies, I'm getting annoyed.

Because I know that we are offering them a ginormous buffet and the neighbor had to completely fence in her new and beautiful rose garden last year with 6 ft? 8 ft? fencing because the deer were loving her buffet as well, when Brad and I planted climbing roses on the arbor last weekend, we went in prepared.

But first, let me just say, we don't often get to work together here, we have our projects and we just get to it when we each have time. This time we planned to do this together. I caught this pic Saturday morning and it just made me smile:

I miss doing stuff together and this was a good reminder to make more time for that.

We needed to cut back the hollies first and that took HOURS to get those two banks of bushes under control. They were 10 feet tall:

Now they are about 6 feet:

As we were cutting back the bush on the right I found that something was wrong with it, the leaves were kind of dark and sticky and there were places with webs—at least they were empty webs! You can see in the pic above that it's a different color than the one on the left. Turns out it has something called "scale". Lovely. So, off I went to buy something called "horticultural oil" that will kill it. Gross. Because of that we decided to plant both roses on the left side of the arbor instead of one on each side. 

We surrounded the roses with green wire fencing so the deer couldn't get to them. So far, so good. I also planted something called hyssop which is part of the mint family (although not so invasive) and the deer haven't touched that. For some reason they don't like smelly things. Personally I'd rather eat hyssop than rose leaves but whatever. 

They also don't eat pumpkin plants (at least last year and this year so far, even with the drought) and I'm seriously considering planting them around plants I want left alone. I don't know if it will work but it doesn't hurt to try! And it's not like I don't have the space :-)

Back to the bushes! As we were clearing vines out of them we realized that the green heron babies had NOT yet left the nest! Ack! As soon as we saw this we stopped working in that area:

Three little green heron babies! They aren't really little compared to song birds, those balls of fluff were easily the size of robins. Cool to see. Brad put up a wifi camera so we could watch them from the house.

While we were out I found something interesting on the pampas grass:

These are mating pairs of love bugs. They stay attached like this for a few days! They are very publicly committed to their relationship. ;-)

Saturday was a big day, we had our first face to face encounter with a copperhead. JeeeeZUS.

I love the good snakes, but the venomous ones must go back to the forest! Which is where this one went. Using a shovel Brad flipped its coiled body into an empty feed sack (which made me shriek even though I knew it was coming) with zero protest from it (that was odd) and walked it out to the far end of our property and let it go. Was that a good idea? I don't know. It's just hard for us to kill living things that haven't even tried to hurt us:

After he tipped it out, it just lay there, we wondered if something was wrong with it:

By Tuesday we were clearing out old fencing and construction debris from where we found it. While we were cleaning we were being calmly watched by this beautiful and non-venomous red bellied watersnake:

It felt very much like it was saying, "But wait! How are we supposed to hunt your mice if we don't have good places to hide?"

Uhhh...use a bush. There are a million of them. :-)

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I forgot to tell you about something that happened on my way to my brother's house in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago! Brad's Tesla saved my life!  

I was on a 4 lane divided highway. I am the blue car at the back of the semi, concrete barrier to my left, tooling along at 75mph:

I was in FSD (Full Self Drive where literally the car does everything for you. EVERYTHING. At this point I am just paying attention as a supervisor).

In the blink of an eye a bunch of things happened:

I saw ahead of us was a flashing arrow, telling everyone that the right lane was going away. 

The car ahead of me has just cleared the semi's front bumper and was accelerating quickly.

I pushed my accelerator to get by the semi and out of its way. 

I didn't even realize that the semi was thinking about coming over.

I tried to accelerate, and the Tesla, in FSD, with its knowledge from a bunch of cameras all around the car, slammed on its brakes...

...while I watched in horror as the semi slid into the spot my car just vacated. 

On its own. 

Despite me.

Keeping me from being slammed into the concrete wall just to the left of us.

Oh. My. God.

I am SO very thankful to have been in Brad's car which has the newest computer hardware and software.

Do I have rage-filled opinions about the person currently running Tesla? Yes. Do I also love the cars? Also yes. I have opinions about Google, Meta, Amazon, Target, Lowe's, and Apple's Tim Cook too. I do my best to keep my money in humane places—but sometimes you buy the car before you know. Once in awhile I still use Amazon. I am on Facebook and Instagram. So many things aren't as black and white as I want them to be...

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Back to the farm!

While I'm filling hay bags in the morning, Tori is hanging out with me, munching on loose hay bits. One morning this week, she wasn't giving me any space to fill them, so I just used her back as my table and she didn't care in the least (video at the top!):

She is such an unflappable girl 99.9% of the time!

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The barking tree frogs are back and suction cupping their way across our windows:

I love them! Look at their itty bitty toes! Sometimes they are bright spring green!

•••

We were told we'd get 5-6 inches of rain this week and while we did get some heavy stuff:

It only turned out to be about 3 inches. Back to dusty dry ground except now it's humid too. 

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Goodness, can you smell this gardenia? They are all over this property and now that it's humid their sweet scent just hangs in the air:

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Lavender skies on Thursday evening:

MEMORIES

I found a few memories on Facebook that made me happy. 9 years ago this week I was prepping one of my barns for my first goat yoga classes at our farm in Colorado:

I miss those bouncing baby goats!

10 years ago my brother and I went on a trip in the Colorado mountains and took this pic somewhere in the mountains. We used some weird filter to smooth lines and ended up looking like this 😂:

This was also the trip where we went four wheeling in Sunny the Jeep. I still don't know why the rocking and rolling cracked me up so much but, SOUND UP! Every time I run across this little video, I still laugh uncontrollably!

EVENTS:

Sunday, June 7th, 5:30—7pm, Sunset Sound Bath on the Farm!

Join in for a peaceful evening of gentle and joyful movement, immersive sound healing, sunset skies, and connection with the animals. Held here on the front lawn at the ranch. Emily will be your facilitator and then I'll come join at the end to take the group down to visit the herd.

Find out all the details here! (Please purchase your tickets through the link. I'm not able to reserve your spot separately.)

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HOW TO WORK WITH ME:

Equine Partnered Coaching! With horses, without horses, in-person, or online, your choice. 

Neurofeedback Train your brain to calm and ease. The most common response I hear about neurofeedback is, "I'm so much less reactive in my life!" It really does smooth out the sharp spikes. Super helpful if your world feels harsh and spiky right now. 

Reiki Another way to facilitate relaxation, calm, healing. If the weather is nice, you can choose inside, outside, or outside in the herd. 

And of course Women's Circles! The Wednesday circle has a waiting list, I will add you to it if you'd like.

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Hope you all have a great week!

Thank you for reading :-)

All of my art and writing is made with human intelligence!

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