They prefer anything their particular skin color and pattern blends in with. The copperheads love any kind of wood mulch and also chopped and shredded leaves. They also hang out on the "edges" where two different types of terrain meet: for example, right where the grassland meets the woodland. I'm always especially careful when I am mowing an edge area. The timber rattlers, to the extent they can, prefer to loiter in areas with dappled shade where their pattern and markings (which can vary quite a bit from snake to snake) blend in. I often use chopped and shredded leaves as the lower layer of mulch, but then add new layers of grass clippings on top of the leaves as soon as there's enough grass to mow. All the grass clippings dry to the color of straw, and most of the venomous snakes we have here don't blend in terribly well with that.

Many of the non-venomous snakes seem to favor grassland, or at least that's where I see them, and both chicken snakes and rat snakes hang out around the compost piles.

In my garden, always and forever, snakes like to get up in the raised beds and hide underneath plants, particularly thick, dense potato plantings. I guess it is cool and shady beneath the plants. Last year, a timber rattler climbed up into a red-flowered Luna hibiscus plant....where it stuck out like a sore thumb....red flower, red flower, leaf, leaf, leaf, snake.....which of these items is not like the others...which of these items just doesn't belong?

Really, though, any snake can pop up anywhere. The only one that has a real challenge in blending in is the rough green tree snake, which is about the only snake I can look at without feeling sick. (Maybe it is their pretty green color?) I often see them sitting up in trees or tall shrubs, or up in tomato cages, wrapped around the plants or cages, or wrapped around canna leaves. When they are in the grass in summer, their green color is so much greener that dry summer grasses that I always wonder if they realize how easy it is to spot them there. Rat snakes are common in the chicken coop where they try to blend in by lying on top of a roof rafter or curled up in a nesting box.

On warmish days that follow cold nights, I always run into snakes of all kinds stretched out on any kind of rock or paved surface.....the patio, the gravel driveway, stepping stones, the roadway, the garage floor if the door is open and sunshine is warming the pavement.....you just train your mind to pay attention and notice what is there, and I still missed stepping on a very small timber rattler by about 6" last year. It is shocking how well it blended in with the gravel in the driveway.

Honestly, I expected snakes when we moved here. I just didn't expect the population to be so large and to be happy to come hang out so close to us all the freaking time. Had I known how snakey it would be here, I probably wouldn't have moved here. This is our forever home, though, so I'm not leaving. I do wish the snakes would leave.

Are you good at snake identification? We have plenty of snakes here in OK that are not venomous, and except for the ones that prey on our poultry, I just try to ignore the non-venomous ones.

I've linked the webpage of OKSnakes which has great photos and descriptions of the snakes found here in our state. Be sure to admire the velvety black rattles on my good buddy, Crotalus horridus. When some people here see a dead velvet-tail rattler lying in the road, they stop and cut off the rattles, which is not something you'll ever see me do. I have no idea why people want a snake's rattles.

OK Snakes

I'm going to try to keep them out of the garden by fencing in everything and then lining the fence with 1/2" hardware cloth buried 6 inches deep (kind of like I did our chicken run only I buried that nearly 18 inches. Then I'm going to "cap" the top of the fence with a floppy 12" of chicken wire so that anything crawling up will have to crawl outward on the wire when they get to the top and will be dumped back onto the ground outside. I saw this used for raccoons and it works pretty well. don't know if it would stop smaller snakes but at least the large ones couldn't get in. Would electric wire around the top stop them? We don't have many but I'd like to keep them out of the garden if I can.

Just did a bit of research. A snake fence needs to be angled outward about 30 degrees. And snakes hate noise so shuffle and poke around with a broom handle before working in an area. I'm actually going to put breakaway collars with bells on them on our goats so that snakes will hear them coming. Get guineas. I might actually do this as we have a HUGE tick problem so they could perhaps solve 2 issues. If only they weren't so noisy... The black and rat snakes are great but the copperheads and pygmy's need to go away.

Shaer, at least some snakes don't like electricity. About 8 or 10 years ago my brother and his wife moved to Little Rock AR. for him to take chemo treatments. While there their daughter called and said the chicken snakes were eating their doves (they were raising some kind of rare dove). I went down to their home in Degueen Ar. and installed one of my fence chargers. I ran a bare hot and ground wire around the square post that supported the house and fly pen. I ran the wires around the post about 2 or 3 inches apart all the way up to the bottom of the fly pen . It seemed to stop the snake problem, as well as the dogs that would pee on the post. If my memory is correct, I insulated under the hot wire with duct tape.

You will need to be careful with a fence charger because some can kill small animals and birds, and they may not be legal to use in town.

That's an idea. I put a continuous fence charger around the chicken run and ended up killing squirrels, birds, and a snake. I then learned that you need an intermittent charger so an animal can 'let go' and drop. Lesson learned.

lil Miss has always been stubborn about wearing shoes outside. She's so tender-hearted it broke myown to hear her cry when I had become openly angry about her tender toes in the deeply mulched garden beds. Still, the battle continued.

Today, we were planting potatoes fully clothed and with shoes. Insert shovel, out pops slithering ground snake.

Battle over !

Shaer, Some snake lovers won't like this, but here is what worked for us when we had a small potager type garden beside the garden shed for a few years and snakes came out of our neighbor's woods and into the Peter Rabbit Garden: We put up a bird/deer netting fence with really small openings---maybe either 1/2" or 3/4". It even could have been 1". It was a very light, almost invisible one. We attached it to a little white picket fence to keep the snakes from coming under or between the pickets. Apparently snakes don't really notice that thin plastic mesh and try to slither through it and get stuck in it. Of course, by the time you find them they are dead, but I'd rather find a dead snake stuck in the mesh, than a live one any day of the week.

Snakes are smart. They have learned that the bottom couple of feet of our garden's woven wire fencing has 1/2" chicken wire attached, so they head straight for the gate. This is particular true of the Timber Rattlers who are too big to get into the garden through the chicken wire.

This would be funny were it not so scary---the snakes have worn a little path where they come under the barbed wire fence and cross the driveway on their way to the garden gate. The path kind of disappears in winter when they aren't active, but comes back in the summer. I try to always look towards that snake pathway are as I walk down the driveway to the garden gate to make sure a snake isn't slithering down its path or trail on its way to the garden gate. We put in a new gate last year that is more snake proof but I still bet they'll find a way to get in when the gate is closed.

Bon, And that's how lessons are learned! I understand her love of the fresh mulch and soil beneath her feet, but there's reasons why we wear shoes and now she sees that for herself. We ran barefoot everywhere when we were kids, but I gave up going barefoot when we found a copperhead in our driveway one day when I was about 9 or 10 years old. Apparently it hitched a ride home with our neighbors when they came home from a weekend at their lake house, and then found a nice, paved driveway to be an appealing place to soak up some sunlight.

Dawn

I did not mean to imply that we garden in the buff, on occasion.

"..fully clothed .." LOL

That's great Bon, fully clothed.

lol. I never assumed y'all were gardening nude, but it's a free country so you can garden however you choose. I assumed fully clothed meant with y'all were wearing shoes instead of going barefoot because I wasn't considering gardening a clothing-optional pursuit.

If I tried to walk from our house to the garden without shoes, a scorpion or wasp would find me long before I reached the garden. I don't even buy open toed or open-heeled shoes any more because I can't wear them here.

I don't remember the last time I was barefoot outside, except when stripping my shoes and socks off my feet after discovering (the hard way) that I'm standing on a hidden (by tall grass) fire ant bed.

imagine being in the buff! I've read up on the Ruth Sout gardening method and it's pretty cool, but the buff part is only for her more ordained followers.

She was brilliant and so far ahead of her time! Her climate was a lot different than ours. If someone wants to garden in the buff here in our heat and sun, they'd better have lots of sunscreen.......and bug repellent.

hahahaha ... owch

I often go out to open the greenhouse in my pjs. Of course, they're old lady, flannels, but turns out our new neighbor is a gardener, too, so backyard trips could be a little more awkward.

I have watched Ruth Stouts video many times and the buff part always cracks me up.

Bon, might not be so smart to garden in the buff next to the police station :) Next to the FIRE STATION, though, hmmmm.

LOL

Cllothes? What are clothes? Gardening should be done in shorts..
Actually, I mean the outer shorts, not the innner, those are optional.
And yes, I do a lot in my fleece warmups and take dogs out in the backyard in my bath robe. If it offends someone, well fie on them.

I don't believe my attire will offend any neighborhood snakes though.

I prefer pajamas but now that I have to drive to town to garden I wear overalls they are most comfortable to me and sturdy shoes, too many stickers and broken glass

For me, the sturdy shoes is the important part. My favorite gardening shoes are leather, steel-toed work boots of the type that construction workers sometimes wear. They are as ugly as sin, but I don't care. I tend to garden in sweats when the weather is cold and in jeans (or capris) and t-shirts when it is hot. We have too many flying, biting insects and too many fire ants for me to feel really comfortable wearing shorts in the garden very often. I'll wear them on hot summer days when I am harvesting though.

While snakes scare me the most, we also have scorpions that like to hide out in the mulch and which will bite your hand while you're weeding. I have been bitten several times over the years and it is incredible how much a scorpion's sting will hurt and make your finger or hand swell. It is just about guaranteed that if I pick up any sort of board or stone in the scorpion season (roughly April through October), I'll get bitten. I've gotten much better in recent years about flipping over a board or stone with a 4' metal fence post so I can make sure the scorpion has time to flee before I put my hand down there to pick up that piece of wood or stone. Weeding is more of a challenge, but if I stay on top of the weeds in March when new ones seem to spring up daily, then it is easier to have the beds weed-free by the time scorpion season starts. They are the worst in any sort of wood or bark mulch or in shredded leaves. Once we are layering on lots of grass clippings over the course of the warm season, the scorpions are not as much of a problem in the mulch.

Dawn, I have a silly tangent question to ask. Here in Arkansas, I've seldom seen scorpions, really only one place...a dry hilltop with lots of rocks.

When I lived in Oklahoma, no self-respecting scorpion wanted to live with me, in a bog, so I was scorpion free again.

It always seemed to me, scorpions were usually a local issue, from my experience, a few hundred yards 'thata way' and they might be not a problem, but right here, every rock has one. Is that false in real scorpion country ? (lol)

After only a few years digging, I can tell you where my scorpions hang out. Mine prefer the dormant or dead underground bermuda roots. Two weeks ago I accidentally poked one's back with my finger. He didn't get me, though. There's another stop over by an old drain where I once found seven of them congregating under a bucket. Man, I can do anything but scorpions. A ground snake pops out suddenly? Cool as a cucumber, but a scorpion. No way. That last one had me screeching and apologizing to my husband for squealing like a baby.

I must wear heavy pants while weeding. Because of my back I must sit down and work about 2/3rds of the time. I prefer shorts, but um no way. i still don't wear glove because I don't have a good pair that I like, but my soil is easier to work now and I can finally use a variety of tools to do the job.

dbarron, Until we moved here, I thought Scorpions only inhabited dry, dusty locations, so was shocked when I kept finding them. I asked around and all our neighbors have them, so they seem widespread here. I also notice when we go to various Volunteer Fire Department fundraisers around our county, which generally are held in the fire stations themselves, it is not unusual to see scorpions running along the concrete floor. So, at least here where we live, they are common in various types of terrain from dry, dusty and rocky to even my well-mulched veggie garden that sits surrounded by woodland. I don't think I'd ever had very much scorpion contact before we moved here---once or twice I saw one in recently-built homes in newly-developed areas when visiting friends. I sometimes saw them when we were out camping or hiking, but I never saw them in or near our home in Fort Worth---not as an adult and not even as a child who played outside all the time. Then we moved here.....

First of all, the scorpions were all over the interior our house the first couple of years after it was built. Friends of ours who built a home here around the same time frame just a couple of miles away had the same issue. We all believed they got into our houses while they were being built, and after maybe 3 or 4 years our homes finally became scorpion-free, During that time, I learned to always hold my shoes or boots upside down and shake them vigorously because the scorpions always got into shoes or boots and would bite you if you stuck your foot in there with them.

I have many horror stories of scorpions from those years....one night, one suddenly fell (I guess it was on the ceiling) into our bed and landed right between Tim and I. Luckily we both were awake, lying there reading in bed and saw it. We had to tear the sheets and everything off the bed to find it because it went running under the comforter as soon as it hit the bed. The other is a 9-11-2001 tale. I was driving my son to school and both my purse and his backpack were on the seat between us. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a scorpion crawling on his backpack. Luckily we were on a quiet country road. I stopped the car, he got out with the backpack, shook the scorpion off of it, and we went on our way. I dropped him off at school, stopped at the store, and headed home. I was listening to a Ft. Worth radio station, WBAP, and was about a mile from home when the morning drive DJ reported that they were getting reports that some sort of aircraft had just hit the World Trade Center in NYC. Because of the events of that day, a scorpion is intertwined in my memories of the 9-11 attacks.

My second scorpion lesson here was that if I went outdoors in shoes that had open toes or open heels (or, obviously, sandals of any type), a scorpion would find me within minutes and bite me....usually in our gravel driveway. So, after a few bites, I completely stopped buying and wearing shoes that left skin exposed.

My third lesson was that the scorpions hang out around our outdoor water faucet, which is in clay soil---no rocks whatsoever and used often enough that it rarely is dusty. The clay there is red, dense and unimproved and often it cracks in the summer, and the scorpions must dwell in that crack because they come up out of it when you turn on the water. For a while, Tim put a drip pan there to catch the water that drips from the hose while it is running, and in the mornings, there would be dead scorpions floating in the water. Since they obviously can't swim, I guess they were trying to get a drink of water.

Then, in the garden, I don't remember getting bitten in there in the early years when it was mostly clay and it seemed for years like every bit of organic matter I added to the soil just got used up every year so there wasn't enough of it, I guess, to attract scorpions. Since about 2005 or 2006, though, they have been a constant problem in there. If there is a board, like a wooden garden stake, lying on the ground and I pick it up, there will be a scorpion on the underside of it and it will bite me. Ditto for any sort of fabric (especially burlap) or plastic. They love to climb on the floating row cover I put over plants if a cold night threatens. I don't know why. My frequent encounters with them there led me to do research where I learned that some scorpions are very fond of living in organic matter, like mulch. I never knew that.

I've been bitten several times, and the last one that bit me caused so much immediate intense pain that Tim and I both hurriedly looked for a snake because I could not believe a scorpion bite could hurt that much. (I cannot emphasize enough that a standard scorpion bite is always extremely painful, and the bite that day was 100 times worse than usual.) We didn't find a snake or a scorpion, but I had picked up a piece of black plastic so was sure it was a scorpion, and I did see a scorpion in almost the same place a few days later. That particular bite was on my finger and both my finger and hand swelled and were sore for about a week. That last bite did it for me. I have been a thousand times more careful about picking up anything off the ground and haven't been bitten at all in the last 2 or 3 years. I do kill every scorpion I see, generally by dropping a flat rock on them or pounding them with a rock or something similar.

Bon, I almost never wear shorts in the garden either. There's just too many things around here that like to bite a person, so I prefer to have as little exposed skin as possible. Occasionally, I'll wear shorts if all I'm doing is harvesting and if it is intensely hot.

Dawn

If ever an opportunity ensues to move back to Oklahoma, I'll do some inspections before I commit...sounds horrid. I wear shorts and flip flops all the time.

Snakes, now scorpions?!?!?! All I want is to do some peaceful quiet relaxing gardening!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! When we moved from Blanco Texas, I was sooo excited: Goodbye scorpions! That was the winter of the Christmas Eve snow storm. Then spring came and there he was...on the bathroom wall. Then the couch, then the kitchen, I seriously thought all summer that I had brought them with me. And maybe I did. But all his cousins were just waiting. So I grow Comfrey. It doesn't get rid of the scorpion (I use rocks for that), but fresh crushed leaves have really reduced my recovery time. Crush them, wrap them around the finger with an ace bandage, and seriously, a few hours later, the swelling is gone, and the massive tenderness is more localized than my entire hand. OR, the scorpions here aren't as bad as the ones in Texas and that's why it works!

Thanks for that tip.

I grow comfrey so I'll try that tip the next time one bites me. My comfrey is entering its third year and I haven't been bitten since I planted it, so maybe it has brought me some luck.

I'm so loving living in the middle of the city...no snakes, no scorpions in my garden. (The only live one I have ever seen was actually at work, sauntering down our long tiled hallway....THIRD floor.!)

We used to have a cocker that alerted us anytime there was a scorpion in the house so we never got stung. There were a lot of scorpions there because of construction.