A Woodpecker Up In Our Tree

I was out in our yard one time and I heard a peckering noise up in the tree. The noise had been going on for quite some time. I had no idea what it was but I know it was coming from the tree above me at that time. When I scanned the tree following where the noise came from, I saw a bird peckering in the side of it. When I saw the bird, I decided to grab my camera really quick  hoping it would not fly off while I ran for the camera. Luckily, the bird was still there, so I was able to take some few shots. I heard of woodpeckers bird busily peckering trees before but I never actually saw one until this one. Here are some shots i got: 

Written and Photography by Jazevox of GardenersLand blog. All rights reserved.

Peach Tree Plant - Keep Ants Off Your Peaches Fruits - Dwarf Fruit Trees

Dont get me wrong, but when it comes to our fruit trees, we dont really wanna share them with the ants. But i noticed that ants seems to love to eat the fruits in the trees, just as much as we do.

I am still in the process of researching what are the good benefits of ants in our garden. I know that ants are very hard working little fellows that every humans should learned from. They work so well together as a team, which humans might forget how to do so sometimes.

But as we (ants and humans) co-exist in this planet, ants seem to cross the path of humans, like getting interested in our fruits trees, for instance. We have several fruit trees in our little yard like peaches, nactarines, cherries, pears, apples, etc, and noticed that ants have the same goal like us, to taste and savor the juicy sweet taste of the fruits.


This is not one hundred percent guarantee that works, but try to paint the tree bark all around the tree to hopefully divert ants away from the fruit trees. We usually use the white paint that are safe for plants and ground. A white paint that are specially manufactured for bark or tree painting, to keep insects like ants stay in the ground, and not climb up the trees eating the fruits. Like other paints, you need brush to paint it to the bark. usually from the bottom of the bark, up to around two to three feet high around the tree bark. Paint will peel over time, so painting needs to be re-done again after few months. This method doesnot always fully work, but it minimized the ants population in the fruit trees.

It is also a good idea that none of the branches and leaves of the fruit trees are touching the house, building, decks, pools, or any other stuff, that may work as a trail for the ants to get through your fruit trees. Try to cut branches that our touching any areas that ants will use as a short cut or road to access your tree aside from the ground to the bark, which you can paint (as mentioned above).

The Buzzing Bees

Bees can easily be noticed in someones garden because of their bothering buzzing sound as they fly around and hop from one flower to the next. For many people, the presence of bees caused fear, uneasiness, and unpleasant stay outside because of their buzzing sounds and the common fear of getting stung by one of them. But bees will be hanging out in your garden just as you want to hangout in your garden. Just watch out for bees before you pick or touch a flower or fruit, a lot of times, they usally dont bother people if people dont bother them, they simply just wanna fly around and check out the plants like you do.

But dont you know that bees play a very important rule in anyones garden? Bees are the major pollinators in most fruits trees, flowers, and vegetable plants. We need bees in the garden to pollinate most plants, inorder for them to flower and/or to bear fruits.

Ladybugs Are Welcome

Ladybug is a type of a beetle and it is a very tiny insect that only measures around 1mm to 10mm. Probably the most common ladybug beetles are color red and/or orange with small black dots or spots in them. They are so tiny its hard to notice that they are present in your garden. But if you are curious about seeing one of them in your yard, closely examine some of the leaves and sometimes posts in your garden area, they might be there just crawling around.

Ladybugs eat aphids, which is one of the common pest problem in many garden. Having ladybug around eating aphids will surely help control the growth of aphids that are developed in plants. For most part, ladybugs are very benefecial to the garden knowing that they eat pests (aphids), so if you see ladybugs hanging out in your garden, its a great news because ladybugs usually make your garden healthier and eat aphids for you without resulting into nasty and unhealtly chemical pesticides and most likely commercial harmful sprays.

Squirrels That You Either Love or Hate

We love squirrels, simply because they look so cute and so adorable, dont you think so too? The picture posted above is a local squirrel we have in our area, having a snack next to one of our flower garden. She and her other fellow squirrels hang out a lot in this particular area of the yard because of the Oak Tree in the middle of the garden. Oak trees have oak nuts that falls from the trees that eventually grow into young oaks and years pass, will turn into giant oak trees as well. And one of the main reason why we love the squirrels hanging out in this garden is because they help us control the numbers of oak nuts that are mixed in with our garden, and eliminate the possibility of having them tiny trees growing in our yard and take over the whole area. Squirrels love to eat oak nuts, so when they are around, they help minimize the work of picking up these the nuts all over that fell from the tree, and let the squirrels do their job. Squirrels also eat pine cones so if you have pine trees and have a lot of pine cones more than you can decorate in your homes during Christmas times, squirrels can be a tremendous help with all the pine cones as well, since they just love to eat them as well.



The problem with squirrels in the yard, is that they are one of the main target for the dogs to chase and bark. Squirrels are wild, dogs are normally not trained to be friendly with wild squirrels, so if dogs are out in the yard of the time, it will minimize the chances of squirrels hanging out in your yard more often, and the less they hang-out, the more oak nuts and pine cones you have to pick up, that is if you have Oak Trees and Pine Trees in your neighborhood. If you live in a condominiums and apartments, these will certainly none of your worries.

In public parks, you noticed that there are some wild squirrels hanging out, and at the same time some signs that say DONT FEED THE WILD ANIMALS, like the squirrels. And you should try to honor these signs and not feed the squirrels in the parks because these will be one of the main reasons that they started bothering humans in those areas. If you feed these squirrels when you are not suppose to, you may not realize and see the danger yet because you see squirrels enjoying your foods, but for other people eating and snacking in the same areas, squirrels might bother them because of people who gave them the idea that people provides them foods. That is why you hear some people that really hate squirrels as well, these people might have unpleasant encounter with squirrels, while others just love them.

So squirrels have strong effects in humans, humans either just hate them, or just love them! And how you feel about squirrels will surely depends on where you live, what they do to you, how they behave towards you. If you have not seen a real squirrel before, but have seen the movie Ice Age, and Ice Age The Meltdown, these movies have lots of funny scenes about a squirrel and her nut, shows how a nut is so important to her, and how she do anything for her nut, for better and for worst...

What about you, do you love or hate squirrels? If you have good or bad experience about squirrels, we would love to hear it too.

Written and Photography by JAZEVOX. All Rights Reserved.

Holey Moley!

Holes and Moles, they seem to rhyme pretty good, dont you think? Holes and moles, also closely associate with each other because moles make holes and that is what they do basically, they tunnel underneath peoples yards, eat flower bulbs, and destroy landscaping lawns.

For all those who garden in their yard a lot, you are probably familiar or heard about moles. They are one of the gardeners worst nightmares. Moles love to be around beautiful gardens and lawns just like people do. But the problem about moles is that they dont treat the yards and lawns like gardeners do. For moles, flower bulbs is like a feeding freenzie, a playground full of free meals.



Moles are like ants, they tunnel in the ground, but ants are small creatures while moles are like rats, they are big, that is why they have more devastating effects in the gardens and lawns than tunneling ants. You cannot really see the tunnels they create but you can tell that they are tunneling below because part of your lawn and garden will have bulky and soft continues curves all around, and if you water these tunneled areas, these tunnels collapses and causing uneven and tiny canal-looking spots. And for meals, they love to eat flower bulbs specially tulips.

I never seen an actual mole, but i can see signs that they are positively present in a garden and/or lawn. Moles are hard to catch and get rid of, but there are some ways control them:

Mole Traps. You can buy mole traps in most gardening and home improvement stores. Most mole traps are mechanically design to fit in one of their tunnels and when the mole use the same tunnel again, they got trapped and clipped. Mole trap is not not our prefered method of hunting moles and keeping them out of our yard and lawns because having to deal with a dead moles body is quite unpleasant and eeky, and sometimes it wont work because moles do not always use the same tunnel again, they usually just make new tunnels.

Poison Foods. Get them to come to the meal, is the key. Attract the mole by using a poison foods that are design to attract moles and poison them, which you can usually buy in gardening and home improvement store as well. A lot of times you can just place them in their tunnel and get them to come back or place them where they are most frequent. Im sure there is a detailed instructions that will be included with the food poisoning product on how to apply them safely. We never apply this product in our yard because we have dogs. I would not recommend this in your yard to catch and get rid of moles if you have pets like cats and dogs because they might attracted to it as well and try to eat it. So better safe than sorry, if you have pets in the yard, this is not the best option for you.

Car Exhaust Suffocation. There are some specially designed hose/pipe for sale that you can use to mount in your car exhaust pipe and place the other end of the hose/pipe in one of the mole tunnel. It is designed to have the car exhaust blown to the mole tunnel and kill the mole with suffocation. This method is probably safer if you have pets in the yard, but might be quite complicated to use because you have to attach the device to your car and all. How to apply it should be included with the product when you purchase itm but I cannot give detail instruction here because we never used this method before.

Chicken Wires. Moles are specially attracted to flower bulbs because it is one of their favorite meals. So if you have flower gardens with bulbs, chances are moles will be tunneling underneath and go towards such garden. Chicken wire application method might work best if you are just planning and starting your garden, before any plants are planted in it. The chicken wire method is done by placing a chicken wire pool about a foot or two deep in your garden area to be, fill it with dirt and plant the flowers above it. This way, when the mole tunnel in your yard, the mole will be stopped outside where the chicken wires are and cannot access the bulbs planted inside the chicken wires. The problem with this process is that moles can start a tunel above your garden and get trap inside the chicken wires with all the bulbs in it. And the chicken wire method doesnt really eliminate the mole, it only diverts their tunneling flow hopefully.

Whichever method you choose, good luck! It is quite a challenge catching those holey moley! Feel free to leave your comments about this post as well.

All Rights Reserved. Written by JAZEVOX.

Invite hummingbirds in your yard

One of my favorite moments in our garden are the times when the hummingbirds starts flying nearby, dropping by the yard to checkout the food feeder or different flowers in our yard. Hummingbirds are quite a small creatures, you might not always see them coming right away, but you will always know when they are there because of their noisy flapping wings. There are few occassions that i mistakenly hear the rapid flapping noise of their wings as a loud sounds of a big buzzing bee right in my ear, and those times are heart pumping scary moments. But there is no doubt that you will be so delighted to realize that hummingbirds are checking out your yard!



We do try some effort to let them come to our yard by setting up some hummingbird feeders that we bought from the store. Most hummingbird feeders are made of red material or if not clear glass with red contents because they seem to be normally attracted to the color red. You can buy hummingbird food mixture in many stores, just add water and ready to put in the feeder.



Aside from setting up hummingbird feeders, you can also plant some flowers that help attract hummingbirds. Hummingbirds are particularly attracted to colorful bright flowers specially with red colors in them. So if you want hummingbirds to come by to your yard, why not set up some hummingbird feeders or plant hummingbird attractant flowers. They are always so cool to be around the yard!



Facts about hummingbird:
Their heart beats 1400 times a minute!
Written By: JAZEVOX

Behind the scene of our spotty lawn

We been having a lot of falling leaves in our lawn area these days from all the different trees that we have around the property. Obviously, the main reason why it is called Fall Season is because most leaves die down and fall from the trees at this time of year.

There are still a lot of leaves that are waiting to fall, but my hubby decided to clean up our lawn area that are full of leaves already. So I decided to take photos of it before he get rid of all the leaves in the ground. While i was taking photos, our lovely doggy suddenly squat in front of me and start peeing in the lawn.

We have two (2) doggies and noticed lately that we have dead spots all over our lawn area. I previously read in a magazine that female dogs urine cause dead spots in the lawn if they urinate in it and the homeowner would not dilute the area with water right away. But our dogs are both house dogs so when we let them out for potty outside we usually dont follow them to see where they do their business. But we noticed that one of them is having a habit of doing it in the lawn area, but we cannot pinpoint exactly which dog is actually doing it so that we can do something about it like train the dog or something. This photo totally break the ice and answer our question that been lingering in our heads for a while.

NOTE: Hope Im not offending anyone with this photo, nor am I a comedian by sharing this photo! Its part of my gardening story! Peace!

Deer, Ohh Deer!

Boy, oh boy! Looks like we have a fellow caught in the act snacking on our Hydrangea flowers that we bought for around $15 last summer! I woke up this morning and found this deer eating on our garden area. Our block wall is around two (2) feet tall, so you can tell that this deer is probably around three (3) feet in height?

Living here in northern CA, it is expected that sometimes deers will be checking out peoples yard for meals. And with all the flowers we have, they seem to love to check out are place quite more often. So we took extra effort of fencing part our yard to keep the deers out and keep our dogs in. But sometimes, deer take a gamble encountering with our dogs, they jump in our five (5) feet wire fenced easily sometimes and had to fight face to face with our doggies in some occassions. At this time of year, October-November, i noticed that they seem to be coming by in our yard more frequently, which is harder for us because we dont want anymore deadly encounter with our doggies and we dont want our flowers to be eaten.

 

Written By: JAZEVOX