I spent the weekend putting together a small vegetable garden for my mom in her backyard. We’re doing tomatoes, zucchini, green and yellow peppers, basil, and rosemary.
She lives about twenty miles from me in Spring, but the soil is so much better than what I have in Conroe.
Dexi (Doodlebug) stepped on one of the tomato plants before I could put up the chicken wire.
We noticed a couple of woodpeckers nesting in one of the dead trees on the side of her house. If you look at the second hole, you can see a white speck that looks to be either an egg or a baby bird.
These are red-bellied woodpeckers. The female is in the nest and the male is on the outside.
My mom loves to feed the birds. The daily customers include cardinals, blue jays, sparrows, finches, doves, and of course, woodpeckers. She used to have a couple of small, green parakeets showing up, but we haven’t seen them in a while.
A male cardinal enjoys some leftover seeds.
She also has an owl that often perches in one of the neighbor’s trees. By the look of the ear tufts, it’s either a Great Horned Owl or an Eastern Screech Owl. I hear the Great-Horned most often in her neighborhood, it’s the classic “whoo whoo” sound.
A dead oak tree stands like a totem pole in her backyard. It kept dropping huge branches so we had them cut off. It is an eye sore, but having the entire tree removed was too expensive. Squirrels often get stuck at the top when we release the hounds.
The esoteric hell that I spoke of in my last post is always worse at mom’s house. I’m guessing it’s because of all the electrical equipment in her backyard. She has a utility pole, a green electrical box, and an old AT&T landline box all targeting her property with electrical pollution. The taps on the sliding glass door are so incredibly loud I’m amazed that nobody else notices, well, except the dogs sometimes.
