Starting with the good news: Gojira-chan lives! The less-good news: the deer (I assume) have resumed nibbling the lilies, and they've also started snacking on the hostas, both their flowers and leaves. This is the first year of the nearly 6 we've been here that the hostas have had damaged, despite being described as "deer candy." I wonder what changed -- is it just that they got more comfortable coming closer to the house? They also nipped some of my coneflowers and a relatively-new black-eyed Susan. I'm a little loathe to keep investing in the disgusting-smelling deer repellent...am I going to douse all my plants forever?
Saturday afternoon, I was sitting by pond when Sean came back from a trot around the neighborhood, so he joined me. He was explaining how he's started to meet some of our further-out neighbors on his walks, including an old lady named Gwen who has lived here for decades and knew our house as the "Bolivar place" (the Bolivars being the first owners, 1961 through when Betty sold it in 2018) because she used to babysit. Among other tidbits, she told him that Don, the husband, had two very mean German shepherds (perhaps explaining why geese may not have been a concern for them...), and that she remembered helping our neighbor Joe's father-in-law when he fell into the creek beside his house, with him begging her not to tell his wife. She also told him that she is no longer on speaking terms with her own neighbor Justine, aka crazy goose lady, someone who feeds all wildlife (and once complained about the price of peanuts, which she feeds to squirrels!) and who once would have tried to dump an extra gosling in our pond, only it was not the same age as the ones there that year. Apparently Justine disapproves of our use of fencing to discourage the geese. Relations with Gwen broke down when she discovered Justine had come across the street to put up a "goose crossing" sign and water dish on Gwen's property, lol.
While we're sitting there we start to notice a bird we don't recognize -- in fact, two of the same species, chasing each other. Then one of them starts fishing, with these very audible plops into the water, and we can't see if it got anything. It wasn't vocalizing, so I couldn't use the Merlin app on it, but following the "step by step" ID we discovered it was a belted kingfisher, which was marked "uncommon" for our area. Apparently they have a specific fishing technique where they dive headfirst and swallow the prey as they go down, so unlike the herons, we didn't see it emerge with anything. As Sean noted, our excitement over this discovery really showed that we are over 40, haha.
I was also by the pond for a bit on Sunday (when I saw Gojira-chan), and I swear I saw something in the reeds, on the far side, push the reeds aside with like a limb. Could a heron do that? I'm not sure. But I have to imagine that anything with a paw, like a raccoon, would make the reed mat move, at least a little. I needed binoculars!
One of my tasks this weekend was to remove the plastic, rip out the regrown weeds, and restart the solarizing. It was weird; the top third of the patch had successfully crumbled into dead dust, but the bottom 2/3 were thriving under the plastic. I also suited up in full Tyvek, two successive days, to battle invasive plants in areas that also contain the native-but-awful poison ivy. From the milkweed bed, I pulled as much creeping charlie as I could, as well as cutting any wineberry and multiflora rose. It was here, a few weeks ago, that I had used a plant identifier on a trailing vine-type plant and discovered it was an invasive called black swallow-wort. Bummer, I thought, I'll pull that later. Welllll then I discovered that the slope up to the road from the back of what we call the "alley" was absolutely covered in them. At first I thought it was Japanese knotweed (which can be found on the road nearby, so I'm sure it's just a matter of time), so it's not that bad, but it's bad. Terribly invasive, hard to remove or control without chemicals (and this is close to the back of the pond, so that's not a great solution), and is allopathic, meaning it changes the soil so other things can't grow.
My second round of Tyvek-warriorness was early Sunday morning, wading in to what we call "no man's land" between us and our neighbors. My primary focus was to remove the Chinese wisteria that tries to climb and eventually strangle all of the trees, though I also found an oriental bittersweet climbing my lilac. Later on I went back with my plant ID app and looked at the many seedling trees, mostly growing on the half that borders our Vietnamese neighbors - a bunch of black cherry trees, some Japanese cherry, a Japanese maple (but its leaves are green, not red like ours, so it was be a subspecies), a shagbark hickory that I need to go back and rescue from a climbing vine, a red oak, a lilac (!!), and a tiny silk tree, which I will have to pull, even though I like them. Oh, and a fuck-ton of rose of Sharon, even though ours don't even bloom.
All in all, it was a very productive weekend, and the weather couldn't have been more beautiful! It absolutely didn't feel like mid-July, though the heat is coming back. I just planted a third trio of two orange mums and one anisse hyssop closer to our house in the center garden, so looking forward to seeing how those get established!
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