Having the turkey's around for daytime entertainment has been fun....gobbling outside your bedroom window at 6 a.m. for 20 minutes not so much. I kept waiting for him to move one, but it seemed he was serenading...I was thinking as Ian suggested that I should grab a knife and get out there after the noise maker.
It was another sunny day, in the 60's somewhere...my kind of day. I stuffed my lovely burgundy colored pudgy toes into my shoes and fertilized the rose bushes. Yesterday we had noticed that some burrowing rodent had pushed up the dirt around several of the rose bushes. Alarming because if it was a gopher we were worried that they were munching on our new rose roots. Today there were more signs of pushed up dirt along the edges of a couple of the planter boxes but no holes.
I was more than half way done fertilizing the 26 rosebushes when I saw an earthworm zoom out of the ground...which didn't really register in my brain until Larry, who was standing nearby exclaimed the dirt was moving. Ah HA! A mole! They eat earthworms and those worms were trying to escape...so it was time to play Whack-A-Mole!
We perfected the technique back in the late 80's when our new sod lawn at the time looked like a world war had been fought on it. Larry tried every method of killing manufactured but smarts, patience and a quick shovel is what finally did the trick. Once one of us saw the dirt moving we would keep our good eye on the movement, determine the direction of travel and Larry with his trusty shovel would drive in the blade deeply, flip and WHACK....dead mole. They are quick and scramble for safety...but it was us or the lawn....Larry researched the heck out of moles and that summer we could have made a lovely hat or coat with moleskins if we had been so inclined.
So today we used the same technique...Larry kept his good eye on the movement...I fast-limped off to get the shovel, we watched and as we saw the nose, Larry got behind it and drove in the shovel and quickly and carefully lifted the dirt and flipped it and sure enough a huge mole, chubby and five inches long met it's demise. I'm thinking that turkey had better watch out!
I planted a few six plants of pansies we got yesterday and Larry worked on his genealogy project.
This evening there were two tom turkey's out here and the deer came through. As the deer move through birds or squirrels usally move out of their way...but not these male turkeys. They stood their ground and hissed and gobbled at the deer, so the deer went around them grazing and the turkeys went back to pecking for seed... What can I say...nature is my entertainment...I love it.
No comments:
Post a Comment