Okay so I made that up, the real song title is "love is like a butterfly" but why hasn't anyone written a song about dragonflies? Kevin Costner made amovie about one, ( and a quite wonderful movie it was too, especially the ending, oh wow)... but I love my dragonflies... they are the joy of my heart. Gregarious, playful (you should see them playing with my dogs, it is hilarious), fearless and with more personality than an insect as small should be allowed to have. And, intelligence, whereas most people will tell you that insects have very small brains I think that they have not taken into account dragonflies. I think dragonflies have brains equivalent to their size, and are thoughtful and cognizant creatures. My interaction with my dragonflies grows on a daily basis, and I am beginning to think that we are becoming as one, ie like me and my pets, now if only they would stop eating my butterflies...

I have lots of reptiles and amphibians in my garden (what can I say mother nature loves me). As well as the Anoles and tree frogs I have various other frogs and toads as well as a great variety of snakes... now as we all know there are good snakes and bad snakes, but for the most part the snakes that I come across are of the good variety and it is only occasionally that I come across a copperhead (usually I am alerted to their presence by my cats who are very adept at finding these things). When it comes to snakes I have a faint English heart, so it has taken a great deal of living and learning for me to realize that every snake out there is not my enemy... some are actually my friends. As for the toads and frogs, well there is nothing to fear there, they are simply slug eating machines who are welcome every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I have a resident frog in my pond, who has been named Jeremy Fisher (a la Beatrix Potter) and who, every evening returns to the pond from his slug eating forays in the flower beds with three well timed leaps and a plop. It is a joy to watch. First up, a newcomer to my garden (and my pond) a juvenile brown water snake, while he is a "good snake" per se, he is not welcome in the pond because I do not want him eating my tadpoles and dragonfly niaids....

the next one is not suitable for small children and those of a nervous disposition... toad porn..... and finally after toad pawn, you get toad spawn... isn't it wonderful how mother nature works...

In an organic garden one is always going to have bugs, whether they be good bugs or bad bugs. However, if you get the right levels of karma then the good bugs will eat the bad bugs but will leave enough bad bugs so that the remaining good bugs have something to eat. Am I making any sense here? Okay so let us being by listing the good bugs, perhaps that will help me 'splain myself lucy. Good bugs are the predators of bad bugs (no wait that seems entirely too simplistic Britty elaborate).... okay, here are the good bugs, Preying Mantis, Ladybugs, Dragonflies, Spiders, of course butterflies and bees (or any type of pollinator) are also good bugs but they do not prey on bad bugs so they are left out of the equation here. Bad bugs include aphids, crickets, grasshoppers, roll-ups (or potato bugs, or wood louse depending on where you come from in the world), Japanese beetles, leaf roller caterpillars, and potato beetles. In a perfect world the "good bugs" will do a stellar job of eating "the bad bugs" therefore minimizing damage to your plants. However, and this is a delicate balance here, you do not want the "good bugs" to eat ALL of the "bad bugs" because if there is a sudden shortage of food your "good bugs" will desert your garden and the "bad bugs" will have free reign and your plants will be toast. Am I making ANY sense here at all? Okay so the key word here is "balance" you have to have a very delicate balance of good bugs and bad bugs in your garden to keep things in order. Needless to say the only way to have such a delicate balance is to completely ban the use of any insecticides, no matter how much you think they are going good what you are doing is not only killing the bad bugs but you are killing the good bugs which pray on the bad bugs. Let me ask you this, how the hell do you think the world got along, farming and food production wise prior to the invention of insecticides, did people starve? Nope, did people not eat vegetables for centuries? Nope. The sad part is that farmers now rely so heavily on insecticides that their crops are only pollinated by wandering bands of bee farmers who bring their hives to the farms to pollinate the crops, in their effort to eradicate bad bugs the farmers have eradicated all the good bugs and now the only way their crops get pollinated (and therefore produce fruit) is through the bee wanderers. Is that not sad? Anyhoo where was I before I went off on my "no pesticide" rant? Oh yes, first up one of my favourite good bugs, the preying mantis, if ever there was a cool insect then this is it... she sits, motionless in the plants, waiting for something edible to come into view, and if you happen upon her she will look at you with curiosity and follow your every move... she is a wonder to watch...

here's one of my garden spiders with a meal, ticked me off to no end as you can imagine because a good bug is not supposed to eat a good bug, I have tried to have a stern talk with them but it does no good...

I welcome tree frogs in my garden, they are a delight to behold and are not only beautiful but are a joy to listen to. However, my tree frogs have been the cause of much contention between my husband and I due to the tree frogs desire to sing.

You have to understand that my husband is a musician and anything singing is important to him. I was woken one Saturday morning at 5am. (I am one of those people who firmly believe that there is only one 5 o’clock in the day and that is the one when I get off work.) “Listen” he says. “mmmmmmffss” I reply (at 5 a.m. you are more likely to find me comatose than you are to find me coherent). “Listen” he says again “the frogs are singing”. Now this would not surprise me because a) the frogs are always singing and b) he is always complaining about it. However this morning it was different. “mmmmm very nice” I respond. “No LISTEN” he says..... I open my eyes, a hurculean task if ever there was one at 5 a.m. “LISTEN” he says again obviously getting agitated at my complete lack of interest that the frogs were singing at 5 a.m. “Did you hear that?” he says. I lift myself up on my elbows and look at him bleary eyed. He is sat bolt upright in bed listening intently. “That was a perfect chord, they are singing in harmony”. I look at him and it goes through my brain that perhaps during the night aliens abducted my dear old man and replaced him with this but I then think better of it because, lets face it, the alien would obviously make a lot more sense. “What?” I said, my sense of incredulity growing by the second. “They are singing in perfect harmony, if you listen, see there it was again, a perfect chord, its amazing.” I glare at him, well as best as you can glare at someone in complete darkness pierced only by a little moonlight coming through the blinds. “You woke me up at 5 a.m. to tell me that the tree frogs are singing in harmony?” “That’s nothing” he said “I’ve been awake since 4 a.m. listening to them.” I have gone over this in my mind many times since it happened and I have yet to find reason in it other than the obvious of course, which I should have known along time ago before I married one, musicians are insane.

Okay so glad I got that off my chest. My bird feeding activities have evolved somewhat over the years. To begin with I simply allowed seedheads to remain on plants knowing that the birds would enjoy them. I also planted fruit trees etc., with absolutely no intention of harvesting the fruit, knowing that the birds would soon find them (in 5 years of growing spectacular grape vines which are just loaded with grapes on a yearly basis I have perhaps eaten half a dozen grapes, and I don't mean bunches, I mean individual grapes.) However, when it came to actually setting out feeders for the birds I was loathe to do so, simply because I am also a cat owner and I didn't want to be serving up a hot lunch for my already over-fed cats. As it was, during a particularly cold winter I spied a rather nice lantern type feeder at lowes and a pole on which to mount it, I decided, having looked long and hard at it that my cats are a) to lazy to try and climb the pole and b) would not be able to climb the pole even if their laziness suddenly left them and they, in a moment of madness, decided to try. So I bought the bird feeder and it was very well received by my winter guests. As time progressed I added another feeder, and then another and then.... well you get the picture, I now have 11 different types of feeders, offering either a mixture of seed and black sunflower seeds and nyjer seed (thistle seed) for the finches, as well as several brick type suet feeders for the woodpeckers, and just to keep things even I also have a squirrel bungy cord feeder so the squirrels don't feel left out. I have to admit that I spend rather too much money on bird food. Whereas other females would go out and buy shoes, clothes and jewelry and then hide them from their husbands, I buy 25lb bags of sunflower seed and pretend that it has been in the kitchen for months. (I do the same with plants "oh that, oh that was 50 cents at Lowes a year or so back, it must have just come back up"). In my defence I do not buy clothes, shoes or jewelry, feeling as I do that they are a complete waste of gardening and bird food money. After years of trial and error I have settled upon a bird food formula that my birds appear to like. I buy a 10lb bag of Wagners Supreme Bird Food, a 25lb bag of black oil sunflower seed, and a 10lb bag of peanuts. I then mix the entire shebang together in the sunflower seed bag and the birds appear to adore it. I also buy a separate bag of nyjer seed for the finches which is never mixed in with the other but is placed into dedicated feeders. In any event, despite me being the owner of seven cats I have had very few losses over the years, and I would like to think that I am saving more birds (especially during the winter) than I am risking losses to the cats. If a photo I took one winter day is anything to go by I think I am right. I took a photo of my garden (not good enough to post here) and entitled it "count the cardinals" when you got down to it, there were 25 both males and females. So I have nicely led into some bird photties. When you put out an all you can eat buffet sometimes the visitors get a little short with their dinner guests, you know the huge person at the buffet line taking up all the food before the others can get to it... I call this "Food Fight"

as for this next one it shows my wonderful relationship with my cardinals. While the males tend to be a little twitchy the females have come to know me as "the idiot human with the black box" and are merely amused by me...