Letter from Tucson--Tomatoes and Snakes!

Tina Sampson writes from Tucson: 
On the garden front, my black cherry tomato plant was getting big and bushy enough is was dragging branches on the ground and kind of collapsing in on itself where is wasn't supported by a small tomato cage. So I bought some bamboo stakes and a small flat metal trellis to help stake up the branches. It worked great. Now the rotten birds have a sturdy perch to land on while the dine on my tomatoes!

I guess I'm going to have to drag out the old bird netting from last year and see if I can detangle it and set it up again. Boo hiss!

A couple of weeks ago I had several snake encounters, but no rattlers, thank goodness. I was heading around the corner of my house one day to turn on the water to water a tree, and almost stepped on a bull snake. Since I didn't know it was a bull snake immediately, that got the old heart pumping. It was about 4 feet long. They are a lot skinnier than a rattler, so somehow that makes them a little less creepy to me (besides not being venomous). I always thought they killed rattlers, but I looked it up and that isn't true. Only king snakes will kill a rattler. A few days later my dog was barking at something in the back yard, and I stepped outside to check it out. It turned out to be two four-foot long bull snakes in the process of their mating ritual. Which I only confirmed by looking it up online! First and last time I'll probably ever see that. No pictures. My camera's zoom lens wasn't good enough from a distance, and I didn't want to get anywhere near them. Venonous or not, they're still snakes and basically really gross and creepy. A few days after that the dog barked again, in the evening, and I found what I thought was a coral snake, so I killed it with a shovel. Looking it up online later to verify the species, I've come to believe it was probably a longnose snake (which I'd never heard of), and if it was, it was not venomous. So that wasn't too bad. I wouldn't normally kill a non-poisoness snake. But, better safe than sorry, I guess.

My electric mouse zapper got a mouse in my garage, which I don't feel guilty about at all. :0)