lol ya'll:D i looked all over for a church key type can opener...Hoss even went shopping for one for me. finally.....one of his buddy's said he had something.....omg i need one of these...it's a larger type church key, on the end of a BBQ fork. so i borrowed it and commenced punching holes in all the ones i'm making feeders out of....and i even took apart the ones i already made, and redid them if i could. oh i remember the aluminum sprinkler cap on the soda bottle. and...we had this huge piece of child-eating machinery called an "ironer"..about as big as a chest freezer. i can remember ironing my dads dress shirts in it when i was so young i had to stand on the kitchen step-stool! and the wringer washer.......my twin and i had to hold each other up to run the clothes through the wringer on the back porch, then carry the basket out to the line to hang them :D what an ordeal! and i don't know if it was just my household, but how did we manage to survive childhood with so many things that shocked the #*@! out of us:D plugging the iron in, our metal play oven..with sharp edges :D...touching the handle of the freezer .....lol kudzu i'll probably make a tutorial for these for next week. happy yard sales! kudzu

Hey, thanks for posting these pictures, I was thinking about the ladybug pavers just two days ago when I once again stubbed my bare toe on the six I have sitting in my formerly craft room-now sewing room (small distinction)! I wanted to make them for friends for a big ole party we are having. Thanks, Lynne

Harry, I only use a few ounces in each feeder. I never fill them since moving up here to NY. When I lived in La. I refilled them twice a day. But until late summer after the juvies have fledged, I only used about 4 ounces to a feeder. In late summer I use at least 8 ounces to a feeder. At that time I usually have 6 feeders up. Right now I have 4...one in the front one on the east side of the house and 2 in the back. I don't put one on the west side as it gets too hot there with no shade or protection. Penny

Larry, You're welcome. Wildlife of all kinds in the yard and garden is one of my favorite topics. I have a love/hate relationship with the deer, but in general one of the things I love about our property is that it has a huge population of wildlife and I do everything I can to encourage the wildlife to hang around. Now that I have successfully fenced them out of four separate garden plots, they are easier to love, though they still nibble the plants I grow on the garden fences. Of course, when you plant something inside the garden and let it climb the fence, you know that wildlife will eat it, so you're setting yourself up for that. We feed the deer during hard times, which usually means the worst of winter, but also fed them in the summer of 2012. Some of the babies we fed that summer still come here regularly to check the compost piles for yummy goodies, or to drink water from the wading pool, pans, etc. For a long time we had a deer herd that lived on our land and I knew all them by sight, but ever since the cougar year, no deer live on our land year-round as far as I know, so the ones we see are just transients. We do see the same ones regularly though. I love the rabbits, but there again it is because they are fenced out of the garden. We must not have many, if any, bobcats and coyotes around this year because we have got cottontail rabbits all over the place. It is not unusual to see 8 or 10 of them out in the back yard and the back pasture near the back compost pile in the evenings. They have been coming out as early as 5 or 6 p.m. and it is hysterical to watch them run and jump and play. They remind me of playful kittens. I never realized how much they play but that's partly because we rarely have this many around. Whatever usually kills them isn't killing them yet. I could live without the squirrels but with a 10-acre woodland full of native oaks, pecans and other nut-bearing trees, it isn't likely that we'll ever be squirrel-free. They aren't much trouble though. They used to plant lots of nuts in my garden, which of course meant I spend spring pulling up the sprouting tree seedlings, but once we raised the fence to 8' tall, they just stopped coming into the garden very much. Crows can be annoying, except for this: if you put out cracked corn on the ground for the doves, the crows will come a couple of times a day and eat it. They don't bother the doves, they don't chase them off, etc. They just want to eat a little corn. However, they are territorial and they don't want anyone else in their territory, so they relentlessly chase away the hawks and owls. I don't mind that they chase away the hawks, because our chickens free-range and the hawks prey upon them. We haven't lost a single chicken to a hawk this year, and the crows get all the credit for that. I kinda wish they wouldn't chase away the owls, because we used to have owls that would sit in the pecan tree in our front yard and hunt rodents all night long, and I kinda miss hearing them hooting out there at night. I have no use for coons whatsoever (at least the possums eat venomous snakes) because they normally go after my corn relentlessly. However, a serious outbreak of canine distemper in Texas has hit the coon population very hard this year and I kinda think it must have crossed the river and affected coons here too, because I have seen only 1 raccoon on our property this year, and I saw it only once and it didn't get any corn even though we had corn about ready to harvest when I saw it here in the yard. Most years we have to fight the coons for every single ear of corn, and some years they get it all, but this year we didn't lose a single ear to them, and I had 5 varieties spread out over three separate garden plots, all of then fenced with tall fences that usually do not deter the coons. I love the wildlife in general and spend a lot of time in summer and in wickedly cold/icy winter weather making sure the wildlife has water available, and sometimes food as well. It is not unusual on a summer evening for me to glance out the back window and see deer, crows, rabbits, possums and armadillos all in the yard and pastures, more or less hanging out together. I love all the little things too---the hummingbirds, ladybugs, dragonflies, damselflies, bees, butterflies, moths, etc. I grow tons of flowers and herbs to attract them. Sometimes if you stand and look at the garden in the evening from afar, it would be easy to say "well, nothing going on in there". Then, if you walk into it, you find all the little flying things visiting flowers. You'll see frogs, toads, lizards, turtles and even an occasional snake. There might be rabbits loitering outside the garden fence, trying to find a low-hanging cucumber growing on the outside of the fence so they can nibble on it. A deer might be standing on the edge of the nearby woodland stomping its foot and blowing air through its nostrils trying to scare me out of the garden because it wants to come nibble at the bean foliage and cucumber foliage on the fence. The purple martins will be flying round and round in circles overhead, hunting for insects to eat, and if you look towards the outdoor security light, a bat might be there looking for bugs. For me, a late afternoon or early evening in the garden is like a visit to a wildlife refuge. I'm always astonished at all the activity out there. Usually I am happier to see the larger wildlife than they are to see me. The rabbits are really used to my presence and I can walk past them and get as close as 4 or 5' from them and they just freeze in place and wait for me to walk on. The deer, on the other hand, never seem to get used to seeing me in the garden and have a fit when I am out there and they want me to "go away". I am always careful to close the gate behind me so a territorial deer cannot come into the garden and challenge me. We have, at various times, been visited by other wildlife, much of it not desirable. We had far too many coyotes in our early years here. We always have too many skunks. We fought beavers for a couple of years and they were just wiping out all our small trees (and some huge ones too that they tried to fell, although they failed, but still killed the trees) along the banks of one of our creeks. On the other hand, I'd never seen ring-tailed cats in the wild until we moved here, and thought seeing them was pretty cool, except for the fact that they were coming to the chicken coop and chicken run to attempt to prey upon the chickens. When we first bought this place, I saw the first horned toad in the wild that I'd seen in well over a decade, and that was cool. We leave all the harvester ant beds alone no matter where they pop up because the horned toads eat them. I'd never seen a glass lizard until we moved here. I could go on and on. We wanted to live among the wildlife, which is one reason we looked for land to buy that was pretty far off the beaten path, although there are some times when I have felt like we have too much wildlife of the wrong kind. The last few years, it has been incredibly difficult to watch the wildlife struggle to survive through the hot summers, so I have tried to plant tons of extra cucumbers, Armenian cukes and melons of all kinds just so I have extras to feed the wildlife. I let the cukes get huge and then slice them open and put them on the ground. Oodles of little birds, big birds, rabbits, deer, etc. will eat those cukes. Now that I've made just about all the pickles I want to make, I could pull the cucumber plants, but I've decided to leave them for as long as they last and use the cucumbers for the wild things. My favorite sound, and one I've heard almost daily this year, is the gobble of the wild turkeys. Some years we have a lot of them around, some years we don't. This is a really great wild turkey year and I've been enjoying them, although I hear them a lot more than I see them. For a while, we had a confused wild turkey tom who apparently couldn't find a female. He'd come to our driveway and stand near the chicken coop and do that wild turkey mating dance. The chickens were not impressed and the rooster was especially unhappy to see him, but I enjoyed watching it try to win the affections of a hen. The wild turkeys also occasionally come to the area where I put out cracked corn for the doves, and they're welcome to eat there whenever they choose. One of the biggest surprises here is the plentiful population of roadrunners. I see them almost every day. They don't come into the yard itself often, but in 2011 and also in 2008, they would come and 'steal' hen scratch and cracked corn in the middle of the hot afternoon when nothing else (in terms of wildlife) was stirring. That was a sign to me that they just weren't finding any of their usual food, and I was glad we had something available that they wanted to eat. Dawn