Iris Time and The Tale Of The Armadillo

Spring showers bring spring flowers.  Except, when we don't get many spring showers!  It's been a hard year in regard to rainfall and the grass and flowers have suffered.  Only the strong survive!

This iris is one of our favorites.  We bought it at the Extension Spring Fling a 

few years ago and it's been a consistent producers each year.

This is another Spring Fling iris.  Talk about a dark, deep purple!  In fact,

it's almost black.  There's one of the Knockout roses in the background.  I don't

think we are totally sold on them yet,

Another one of the black ones.

The grass looks pretty bad but the flowers are doing better, as long

as you pour the water to them,

This flower bed also contains blue sage.

Now that is a purple iris!!

Clouds......

just teasing us!

The spring and summer of 2018 was dry in these parts.  We had to water everything pretty often if we expected plants, or anything, to look decent or in some cases just to survive.  There are several old hackberry trees and ligustrum that look as if they have "bit the dust!"   I don't care so much for the hackberries, although it just makes for more work having to cut them down.

Another problem associated with dry weather is that when you water the grass, it's an open invitation  to every armadillo in the neighborhood to come over and dig for it's next meal.  For several days we had a nightly visitor in the back flower bed.  We tried staying up for him but he eventually wore us down.

So, we decided to try trapping the little stinker.  Everyone told us that it's hard to trap one and how we'd have to funnel him toward the trap in order to have a chance.  We used some boards and tried to force him toward the live trap since I don't know what you bait an armadillo trap with!

It went on for a few days with no luck.  Finally one morning Beverly hollered at me from the kitchen and told me to come look!  Bingo, we got him!  It was huge!  Now, I usually dispatch these kinds of pest quickly, but I wasn't in the mood to bury it.  So, Mr. Armadillo got a trip to the river and his commuted!  What's strange is that a few days later we caught a second one and later I think one more got in the trap but worked his way to freedom.

Armadillos look like they were put together by a committee!  It's funny

that this creature is the symbol of Texas, or maybe just Lone Star beer!

Simon was more than a little curious about his new friend.