The Spring Post that drove me crazy (short drive)

This was supposed to be an adorable picture of Tinkabelle learning to go up stairs with her cast, but this whole post is giving me nothing but trouble and doesn't want to let me move the pictures around, so it figures that this picture of my cute little puppy looks like zombie puppy, which is still cute in its own zombie way...
It was a couple of blogs ago that I mentioned looking for and showing you that we, too, have Spring here, but then I got creative, frankensteined my blog, was rescued by Amy the heroine and now here is the "Spring is kind of here" post. While busy looking for Spring in our yard, I found a treasure in the making. Here we have the very start of a strawberry or two...can you count how many flowers there are? This is not a trick question as I need to know if I need to get some jars to make preserves or a good strawberry pie recipe...just kidding, would someone so knowledgeable about pyola need to ask about strawberries ??(probably, yes). By the way, the strawberries (picture of) fell to the bottom and I can't get them back up here.

This next picture is of some plant that I so happily started from seed and I thought it was blue flax, but it never bloomed, just put out this pretty green foliage that it had last summer, so I am hoping it is not a weed that I have been so carefully cultivating!

Now these lovely pink flowers were a purchase I made at BJs (which is like Sam's or Costco, but not) two years ago and I can't remember what they are called (I could cover myself here and just make up a name like pinkultimitus dolittleitis and impress you, but that might not be Christian, so I won't tell fibs), but they have a wonderful perfume and the label said that they are great for hard to grow areas (pretty much sums up our whole yard) and grow fast. Now you want to hear something both pitiful and hysterical at the same time? In my immense naivete, I decided it would be wise to warn our next door neighbor about these fast growing plants as they are on a slope between his yard and ours. I proceeded to tell him that they are wonderful and fragrant and he can cut them if they start to become invasive (he's probably thinking, I can only hope they'll cover that ugly as sin slope). Well, they are obviously peaceful and non-aggressive, rats, rats, rats and are not covering much of anything!



Now these strawberries belong with paragraph two, but they refuse to move, so I say pshaw on them and stay where you are and people will put two and two together anyway!

This is a very challenging post and won't let me write in colors I want or anything, but I'm going to call it a blessing anyway ("so there" whatever force is impeding this post) because God's blessings are so much better and stronger and more wonderful than anything I can imagine...thank you, Lord!!

P.S. Are you ready for a nice tutorial on fish emulsion? It's awesome stuff, but a little smelly. This one you probably DO need to hold your breath for.

Pyola, pyola, pyola

Boy, how much excitement can one bug killer cause??!! If I had known it would be this thrilling for so many, I would have been putting a little pyola in each blog! So here goes a description of pyola (with a few commentaries):

Pyola Insect Spray

Kills insects, such as adelgids (think these guys are swedish or norwegian), ants (definitely all amercian) ((except fire ants...which nothing really kills, anyway, as they are super heroes from another galaxy, harvester ants (think they harvest and you cry), carpenter ants (eat your fence as well as your veggies) and pharaoh ants (don't have to worry as they live in Egypt)), aphids (it's good that these guys get killed because there are trillions of them, armored scale (now is this fair, that they even have armor?), beetle larvae (yuck is the best I can come up with for anything that has the word larvae in it), cankerworms (these guys are gonna be a close second on the yuck list), fungus gnats (oh great, is this a bug with a fungus, a two yuck for one?), lace bugs (love lace, but i do draw the line here), leafhoppers (yeah right, what a name, bet leaf- chewer-uppers is more appropriate), leaf miners (finally a name that fits), mealybugs (a man HAD to be the one to think up these disgusting names!), mites (but they really are mighty mites), phylloxera (can't you see yourself saying this name in the ER...what bit you???), plant bugs (wow, now that was original), psyllids (related to those other p letter bugs), scale insects (as in they can even scale a tall building), spider mites (this is in case you don't find the mites creepy enough, they are half spider), thrips (this one sounds like it was named by someone lisping), sawfly larvae (gross), spittlebugs (now i am picturing a bug with spittle hanging out of its' mouth), webworms (I am running out of disgusting adjectives, but this is creepy) and (finally!) whiteflies (so you won't confuse them with our wonderful household flies, I guess).

Hang on, there's more:

Kills caterpillars, including gypsy moth caterpillars (must travel in caravans), tent caterpillars (in tents, of course), leafrollers (are these guys making their own cigarettes?) and diamond back moth larvae (not to be confused with a diamond back rattler, please).

Kills beetles including flea beetles, Colorado potato beetles and Japanese beetles.

Gosh...guess who's not going to eat dinner tonight? Anyway, I copied this out of the catalogue for all of you Pyola lovers. The name of the place is gardens alive and there is a web site, http://www.gardensalive.com/, so go make yourselves feel queasy reading about all these bugs. PLEASE tell me you don't want pictures!! Well, here is one picture...this is a turtle and he eats bugs, so you have to use your imagination or try clicking on this picture and maybe you'll find a bug or two.

Tonight's blessing is going to be thinking of anything but bugs, although they do make birds and turtles happy.

This is baby Dolly right after she was born...I will even challenge the mother, just to hug the baby...crazy redhead!!

Here goes a new blog. I was going to make this the world's/U.S.'s/Georgia's shortest blog, but then too many things kept popping into my head.

Actually, I even have a question for all of you professional bloggers. I want to make my thingee at the right teeny tiny like other bloggers have it, but how do I do that? Sad to say, this blog will make my nativities blog disappear into blog archive heaven, BUT, if I had a teeny tiny thingee...isn't it a slide bar, then it would hold more blogs. If I add lots of gadgets, will that do it?

I knew everyone would be holding their breath (maybe even literally) about the llama poop, so i wanted to give you the scoop on the llama poop (I can wax eloquent when it's late at night and I'm tired). You would probably like the llama poop (Tinka does, she rolled in it and had to get a bath yesterday) because it's almost odorless, so it's great to gather and transport (uh oh...Renna, don't read this if you're eating).

Anyway, it's going to get tilled into our new garden area so we can stay organic (something dear to my heart) and we will also be using pyola (all natural) to control the naughty bugs. Which reminds me of a story from my Irish mother's side of the family. My grandmother always had a big garden and the kids (only one out of seven children continued with gardening and then along came the only grandchild interested...me) always had to help. One of the jobs was to knock off the bugs by hand into a can of gasoline or something like it to kill them. My uncle Jim had NO bugs in his can, but he was still out there long after everyone else finished their rows. Grandma found him knocking bugs to the ground over and over. When questioned, this little guy said he figured they'd just get too tired and leave!!

I included some llama pictures that may or may not have llama beans (poop) in them, if you click on them.

Okay, enough of that, so tomorrow, Good Lord willing, there will be some nice pictures of the garden and some signs of Spring in the back yard...Spring is so exciting! But then, all of God's seasons are full of their own beauty and lots of blessings.