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Fire Ants on the Crepe Myrtle tree, Lewisville TX. This photo does not represent life-sized fire ants, thankfully! I’m a bare-footer, so here in Texas I’ve adapted to getting stung at least once a day. These ants are everywhere in the south, year-round, and there is no eradicating them…you can only discourage them from growing colonies in certain areas; they just move from one location to another. It’s said that if you have fire ants in your yard you don’t get termites.Counting blessings then, I’d much rather have the ants.
Every year I have to actively discourage the fire ants from establishing their nest at our back door. The fire ants are always present, but two or three times a year they try to set up their home in ours. Rather than use commercial insecticides, baking soda and boiling hot water work great. If that doesn’t do the trick, bleach diluted in a spray bottle and pure tenacity do the trick. It may take days, going out every hour — each time a layer of ants comes to the surface I bombard them with one of the two solutions. They are not easily discouraged, but finally, living in our house is no longer an option for them…until next time.
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Manitoba is notorious for its clouds of mosquitoes during the summer. 1st photo – Yorkton, Saskatchewan, 2nd photo – about 200 miles west of Winnipeg.
i carry your heart with me
(i carry it in my heart)
i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is you doing, my darling
i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s whatever you are a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you.
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of a sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart.
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
Frog and spider in my back yard pond, Lewisville, Texas
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Welcome to my garden, little ladybug.
Help yourself.
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While tidying the garden today I picked this up, and for a split second I wondered how a dead leaf could be so soft and powdery…and fluttering! If my camera would cooperate I could have taken a great macro because the moth let me get as close as I wanted. So pretty!
My old Canon AE1 would snap pictures no matter how close I got to something, but even on ‘manual’ the Canon EOS 20D will only allow me to get about 4 inches away before the shutter refuses to close. I miss my old fashioned (1980) Canon sometimes, and even the new Canon AE1s cannot compare to it. I don’t miss developing though, and the other restrictions.
Beetles and wasps on Yukka seed pods
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Praying Mantis, Kitty Hawk, Outer Banks, NC
Waterstrider in Lewisville TX back yard pond
