9.
Garden Boy is looking a little ratty...needs new stuffing...but he'll just have to get in line...I'm not twins, you know...sometimes I'm not even one.

... a nest of chickens in his hair....


The next picture is an old moccasin of Jack's that used to be overflowing with Hen&Chicks, but the turkeys made short work of that. They are as destructive as a herd of cows...they don't eat my plants, but pick them to pieces for the fun of it. I made the mistake of not keeping the moccasin inside the fence where the garden is.
The snake is a pet I brought from eastern Oregon. I seem to have no snakes here at all....at least at our place. I'd like a nice little garden snake sunning itself on a rock by the fish pond....at first I though Sally and Bekka were keeping the snakes away and then it dawned on me I never see them anywhere on our place, and I'm always out in the woods, poking around, turning over rocks, just generally butting in.

I like snakes....I like all reptiles...
Once we lived where we had lots of garden snakes so I caught one and brought him in to live in an aquarium....without an adequate lid. So I improvised a lid and left for awhile to make a good lid. When I came back the snake was gone...and we hadn't even gotten to know each other. I looked evvvvvvvvvverywhere. No snake. Turned the house upside down and shook it. No snake. I knew Jack was not going to be happy about this so I added it to my list of NeverNeverTell things, and life went on as usual. One day I decided to put some goldfish in the empty aquarium and I found an open box of food left over from my last goldfish. I put my finger in the box to lift the tucked down lid...and felt the coiled up snake!!! That box went flying off my hand like a home run in Yankee Stadium. I like snakes but I don't want them sneaking up on me. He had been coiled up in the box...I can't imagine how he fit....for at least two months......Or maybe he just spent the days there, and prowled around at night. I let him go....figured he'd earned it.

6.
Rosettes and babies

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
Had so many chickies she spread them all over her garden

Don't throw away broken pots. Partially bury them and plant a display around them.



Girls gone wild.
They don't usually go to seed in such a dramatic way.
Click on picture to enlarge

Hen and Chickens..

other names Live Forever-Houseleek-Old man and woman

Family: Crassulaceae..(crass-you-LAY-see-ah)

Genus: Sempervivum..(sem-per-VEE-vum)

Species: Tectorum...(tek-TOR-um)

evergreen perennials

When you see sempervivum tacked on a plant it is Latin for always living and means the plant is evergreen, perennial and hardy.

tectorum means roof

The story goes that hen and chicks were planted on roofs to

prevent lightning?

prevent thatched roofs from catching fire?

Probably the later, if any of it is true, because with moisture filled leaves they would be fireproof.

Hen and Chicks were my first plant to grow as a child. Gramma Lamb had them growing along side her little house in North Bonneville, Washington before the Bonneville Dam put the town underwater and they had to build a new one.
She was not my grandmother...everyone in the tiny town called her that, and I knew nothing of her family. Oddly, manymany years and miles later I found myself related to her by marriage...but she was long gone by then.

Hen and Chicks grow as a succulent rosette...the hen...surrounded by her little pea size chicks. Cut or break the chicks off and poke them dirt and they grow. Every few years a rosette will bloom...I've not seen a definite time line but once they bloom, they die. You can let the bloom go to seed and collect the seeds if you have nothing better to do....no blogs to maintain...no books to read...no cats to draw...

We have lived in many houses and one had whole beds of Hen and Chicks thickly matted. I loved them and when we moved I took a goodly strip of them and planted them alongside the new house. One day while I was gone we had a man with a bulldozer come to do some repair work and he ran his dingdong machine back and forth over my plants. Hen and Chicks are tough but even they have limits.