That's sweet;) I have an older, fat, neutered cat who I allow into the fenced backyard. He never attempts to climb the fence or escape, but he so loves being out there with the wildlife. The birds pretty much ignore him, and he pretty much ignores them. We have (had??) a little bunny living under the garden shed, and they'd all be out there at the same time. The cat did swat a bird once, and hurt it...I tried to save it, but it made the other birds SO mad, and you'd have thought I live deep in the Amazon jungle with the sounds they were making. Now, if the cat happens to be laying in their way, they dive bomb him. He just lays there and doesn't fight back now...lol I love it when all the little creatures come together in peace, even if only for a little while.

They were on the patio because they were scared of the rain and the wet ground since they have so little experience this summer with wet stuff falling from the sky? Or maybe they don't like wet feet. Maybe they were asking one another "what the heck is this weird wet stuff?".

Our animals coexist (oddly) with wildlife at times, especially in bad weather, and the wildlife can peacefully coexist with one another when they come to our yard in drought to be fed and watered. I've looked outside at times and seen deer, rabbits, coons, possums and armadillos all eating and drinking together, along with frogs and birds. Sometimes our dogs and cats are right out there with them, standing around with them but not paying any attention to them. They don't even really look at each other. They just eat, drink and leave. It reminds me of The Peaceable Kingdom.

Something ate a wild bird in our front yard very recently. There is a pile of feathers and nothing else. I am pretty fed up with chickens running the whole yard, I think I'm going to fence off the back and put bird netting over the top of most of it. They'll be safer, I'll be happier and DH will swear at it when he mows.

I agree that they'll be safer, you'll be happier....and I'll take your word for it that your DH will swear at it when he mows.

Today, right in front of me, a white leghorn jumped the fence into the dog yard. That's the first time I've seen it happen. Usually I just come out the back door to check the dog yard for chickens before I let the dogs go out into their yard, and I find a chicken in there, and then the chase is on for me to get the chicken out of the dog yard so I can let the dogs out. This one quickly realized I was displeased and flew back out of the dog yard. If I'd let the dogs out without checking the yard, he might be a dead rooster at this point.

The dog yard fence is only 4' tall and always has kept the dogs in so we've never raised it higher. I guess it is time to raise it to either 6 or 8'. That will make me happier in the long run because coyotes are less likely to breach a taller fence than a shorter one, but then we never leave the dogs out in the dog yard if we aren't home, so the coyotes haven't been able to get into the dog yard while the dogs are in the yard, though they certainly taunt the dogs and try to get the dogs to come over the fence after them.

Our son's chickens, which are the ones getting into the dog yard, appear to be more stupid or at least less experienced than our chickens. At least our chickens know to respect the dog yard fence, while his mostly younger chickens don't seem to understand that yet. They'll get it eventually, I hope, and I hope it happens without any chickens dying.

We're having a massive explosion within the grasshopper population and the chickens are having a wild time chasing, catching and eating hoppers. Maybe that will keep them busy away from the dog yard for a while.

Miss indepenent wouldn't go in the pen again. I let them all back out and hope I can get them in closer to dark. I have a white one that keeps getting under my feet! Or walking over them. WTH, can you not see I'm bigger than you?

Miss Independent has a brain the size of an adult thumbnail or a dime or penny. There cannot be too much going on inside a brain that small, although I do think chickens are smarter than most people give them credit for being. She just doesn't care. Our chickens seem to live by the motto "You are not the boss of me." I am sure they secretly think that we are their servants.

45 minutes later they all went in the pen. I think the baby rabbit has imprinted on one of them. I keep finding it with them. It doesn't even seem to be afraid of me anymore, just the dogs. Years ago, when we had geese a rabbit adopted the gander. I don't think it was wild, I think it had once been somebody's pet. It would sleep with the gander, and since it was white, maybe the gander thought it was a gosling, who knows. When the geese hatched a gosling the rabbit protected it from the stray drake duck that also adopted us.

That is hysterical. We have rabbits around so often that the cats don't even chase them any more. They might watch them, but they don't chase, and perhaps that's because they know I'll yell at them if they get a rabbit...so rabbits here are for viewing pleasure only. We have a lot of rabbits this summer but by August the coyotes pretty much will wipe them out.

I have not noticed that it has eaten anything IN the garden, at least there's no damage I can't blame on cut worms or grasshoppers. The chickens like the greens I have left, so maybe its joining them on swiss chard. I worry a little that it is orphaned, we found the remains of a rabbit in the back. Just the skin. I was told hawks eat everything but the skin and then carry that away and drop it. IDK, it's driving my beagle crazy. I don't think she even wants to hurt it, it is just the hunt. And she is too old to catch it. We do have granddogs that visit occasionally who are young enough to catch it.

I have some random questions I'm going to tack on to this thread. Annual chamomile. Does it bloom in spring and die or am a bad chamomile mom? Comfrey. Tried to take over the world last year. Looks like it's dying this year. I thought you couldn't kill this...I apparently am killing four oclocks, too? I would say it's the bed, but other things are surviving. Oh, and check out my determinates in the straw bales. yeah, I'm going to go pull them.

Went to the Y this morning for water aerobics, had lunch with the "Deep End Girls" (deep end of the pool), spent the afternoon in A/C starting seeds. Cool and clean for a whole day. But, I had to water and put the chickens to bed. No longer cool and clean. Maybe I'll take up stamp collecting.

Chamomile is cool-season and dies back as we heat up. One plant must set hundreds and hundreds of seeds because I have chamomile all over in late winter. It sprouts continually for a couple of months if not longer. I leave them where I want them and yank them out where I don't. Some of them seed to come back from the roots as they are much larger and quicker to grow and bloom than the ones that are obviously brand new sprouts, so maybe they are half-hardy annuals here.

Amy, and you know I am saying this in fun....if you are killing four o'clocks, there is no hope for you. Or at least there is no hope for them. They are on my list of plants that won't die and that you can't kill, so I don't know what is going on. You might check the soil around the bulb or tuber or whatever the heck it is and see if something like a vole is eating them. That might kill them. We have some that have been in the same place for a few years, and their tuber is the size of a human head. I won't be digging up and moving those plants.

That little determinate tomato is just so sad. Apparently it must be allergic to straw because it sure does look sickly.

Our chickens are an endless source of amusement, except when we want them to go into their coop for the night. Then they are an endless source of aggravation. Amy, we need to write a book about why women who raise chickens have gray hair......I bet we could come up with a lot of reasons, and we could blame it all on the chickens. Not that you or I have any gray hairs. Only Miss Clairol knows for sure and she isn't telling.

I let the chickens into the garden today to eat grasshoppers. They do a pretty good job but they won't leave the garden until it is about 1 minute (or 10, 30 or 60 minutes) past sunset. At least when they leave the garden they do run like mad for their chicken coop, like all of a sudden they realize it is almost dark and they shouldn't be out in the dark. I don't know why they can't plan ahead and leave the garden and go get in the coop before pitch black darkness descends and I'm out there with a flashlight trying to close up the garden gate while avoiding stepping on any snakes.

When we moved here, the previous owner had lots of things planted along the fence, fruit trees, roses. Gradually most of them died. Did the city or elec company come spray them? Could be, though they mostly came through with chain saws. The bed the four o'clocks are in is in that area. I've always wondered if there was something toxic there, which is why it is for ornamentals. It could be the bed is too shallow. The one plant from last year came back, but one I planted this year is poorly and the other is gone. Maybe the chickens scratched it up. We didn't do much to prep that bed, it could be compacted soil underneath. IDK, I find I can kill the unkillable and have surprising luck with others. Oh, and there are 2 tomato plants in that center bale. Neither is happy.

I'm not convinced straw bale gardening is a great idea in our summertime heat. It might be great in spring, fall or winter. I know what wet bales of hay do inside---they decompose like crazy and that decomposition causes a lot of heat. You can break open an old wet hay bale and steam will come right out of the middle of it. I can't help thinking the straw bales might be doing the same and cooking the plant roots. And, the amount of water and fertilizer it would take to keep those plants happy in the hot weather is mind boggling. Maybe smaller plants like beas or peas or lettuce or whatever would be happier in our climate in straw bales than tomatoes or peppers or other plants that are big water guzzlers. Four o'clocks are just odd. They grow where they are happy and won't grow in places that they don't like. It took me years of trying to raise them from seed before I finally got some that were happy and stuck around. Probably I was putting them into too much clay. They even grow in clay nowadays but our clay is much improved compared to what it used to be like. For me, the easiest way to start new plants is to pull up seedlings and throw them on the compost pile in spring. At some point in the summer, we'll have waist high four o'clocks that have taken over the compost pile. Or, perhaps some of those are coming from seeds that were in four o'clock plants I threw on the compost pile in the autumn. Everywhere that I've used a compost pile (left in place with us never removing the compost) hugelkultur hybrid type pile to try to heal erosion gullies in our land now grows four o'clocks. It wasn't intentional, but it happened. I'd rather look at a big clump of 4 o'clocks popping up in a field than to look at the bare soil of an eroded gully that continues to erode away every time it rains. I think a lot of the gullies we're fixing, bit by bit, are old cow paths that eroded and became gullies, because I see the same sorts of gullies on ranches around us. They start as cow paths but time, heavy rainfall and erosion work away at them and they fill with water rushing through them in heavy rainstorms, and each storm carries away more soil. At our place, the four o'clocks have become a big factor in fixing spots like that. We never mow them and just let them reseed. They don't spread seedlings all over the fields, but the clumps where they grow get a little bigger every year.

The straw bale process involves a 10 day prep that is supposed to heat up the bale and then allow it to cool down. Tried it first last year during the monsoons. In my opinion, nothing thrived until the roots hit soil underneath the bales, and then it acted like thick mulch. While I did do the prescribed prep on these bales, we cut and dug out a cylinder shaped hole that went nearly through to the ground, then added potting soil, set in the plants and added more potting soil. I am using them like pots with a hole in the bottom. These bales are over the wet spot in my yard, I don't water them any more than anything else. It is very possible, that since they are in the middle, that bale is hotter than the others. I'm not sold on this process, but it has worked reasonably well in this low spot. It is just another way to expand my growing space. I tried growing daikon radishes there last winter, they didn't do much, but one is growing in front of the bales, LOL.

Amy: I've thought about straw bales, for extra things in my limited-space garden, so I am very interested in what you have learned, overall.

Last year I grew potatoes and tomatoes in straw bales. It was a very wet spring so the potatoes in bales did better than they would have in the ground. DH didn't think they produced enough, but they really did as well as anything else we've tried. I haven't had the space to grow them in a bed until this year and they didn't do well, but they also got blight like overnight. Last year I just kind of pried the bale apart and dropped the potato in. As I said above, this year I am treating them like a pot, hollowing out a hole to put soil in. Not a big hole, the idea was to get the roots down to the soil below without having to deal with digging or weeding. I was hoping to use this as a way to kill grass and start a new bed. I grew cow peas there after the potatoes (moved the straw) and then daikon radishes. I still think it would have been a good plan, except it turned out to be a low, wet spot that still is too wet. Supposedly you can plant anything in the bales with just a shallow layer of soil to start seeds in. This did not work for me. I do think in our normal summer weather they dry out too fast for that. Might work early spring or late fall. I am considring a couple of cabbage plants after the tomatoes this year. Some people plant in them for 2 years, mine became mulch for the rest of the garden. The tomatoes last year were a single bale layed end to end in a row, so they probably did not hold in as much heat as the side by side ones this year. But you could use that to your advantage in early spring I guess.