A Gardeners Journey Through Pictures

We moved into this house in 2001.We are located in the Northern Shenandoah Valley, with that valley below us on our east and Back Creek Valley on the west side of us. In the forest we have many Oaks, Maples, Pines, some Locust trees and Dogwoods and various other trees I don't know what they are. Being that we live on a mountain we our area is full of ravines and small streams that lead into the Mill Creek and then into the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers and eventually into the Chesapeake Basin. Our property is on one acre tracts and our just so happens that our land has alot of the ravine on it. On the back side of the property runs a very small stream.

The wildlife here is awesome. There are three species of Woodpeckers here. One is the Pileated Woodpecker and I am not kidding you when I first saw one of these and how large it is I thought I was back in pre-historic times. They are as big as a full grown male cat. Huge they are! A wonder to watch too. The other two species are small, but you can hear them all the day long pecking at the trees. Another species of bird is the BlueJay. We have lots of them around here. They are mean and will steal from the cat dishes that I have out for my cats. I watched the mother bird actually teach her baby how and when and what to take out of the cat dishes. Amazing! We also have Cardinals and they are very beautiful and have a nice song. I wish they would sing all day long. They seem to migrate though. Hummingbirds come around too. They are Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds. I wish that I had more like my mother does. She lives two hours northwest of us. She fills her feeders almost once a day. The first year I started feeding them I had one lonely hummer, the next year I had three hummers and the next year I didn't have any and this year I have four of them. I sit in my living room and from there I can watch them on the front porch and the back deck. Their food is on the back deck. One day as I was just sitting there I watched a humming bird come and drink nectar from my geraniums and then go back and drink from the feeders. They are very territorial and do dive bomb each other. You see it all day long. When they run out of food in their feeders one of them will always come up right to my face and stare at me. He is telling me that I need to get the feeders filled up again. I almost got pecked in the head one day when the feeders were empty.

We also have Deer, Raccoons, Opossums, Snakes, Spiders and we used to have Chipmunks. There are lots of mice, moles, voles and other critters too.

In the midst of renovating the house we also renovated and cleaned up the yard that we have. Now it looks easy to do here but in reality we have about 2 inches of topsoil and the rest is shale. Shale isn't the easiest kind of rock to get out of the ground. As you hit it is slices and you have to dig deeper to get the the bottom the the slices of rock to pull it out. Now some of it is limestone and sand. We use a Pick alot of the times because a shovel won't even get through some of it. Neither will a post hole digger. We have had many tools break on us while digging around here. We also use a digging bar for some of it. The vegetable gardens are on raised beds. This was easier to plant and reap what we planted (uhh, depends on the year if we get anything or what we do get out of it). Well here are the pictures of our gardens and read under then to read the informative captions.