Life on the plantation

One of the old sayings that my dad shared with me years ago was that two things a man can want the most and catch up on the quickest are sex and rain. Well, we got caught up on the rain part last night. There are a lot of great things about living in the country, and I would not trade where I live for any place on earth. However, one of the few downsides to country living is that every time a mule toots or a hard rain falls, we lose our television satellite reception until the storm passes. Last night was one of those occasions. The only problem was last night also happened to be the season finale to one of Martha Cox's favorite shows.

I was fortunate to be away from the house at the time at a committee meeting at our little country church which is only about five miles from the house. People have often asked my why I am a Baptist, and the answer to that is very simple. We only had two choices out here in the sticks when I was growing up ---Baptist or heathen since the Hopeful Baptist Church was the only church within 15 miles of us. Now if there's one thing that Baptists love over almost anything else, it is forming a committee to discuss an idea to death. This may be one of the few times in my life where being on a committee worked to my advantage since I missed some of my wife's unhappiness with the Dish Network. I don't know how it works in your homes, but most things like this end up being my fault. Since I wasn't there, I couldn't take the blame.

Speaking of home and country living, I am still fighting a running battle with armadillos. I have my own private political views on immigration which I will not share in this space, but I will share my thoughts on the immigrants known as armadillos. A couple of good sized armadillos can make a well manicured yard look like a herd of hogs have been rooting in it all night long. They have no natural enemies in our part of the world, and it was also discovered through research and radio telemetry of quail nesting sites that these "possums on the half-shell" also eat quail eggs. So, as far as I'm concerned, the best solution is total eradication of these pesky critters. They do not respond well to trapping, but they do respond exceedingly well to high brass #6 shot from a 12 gauge shotgun at close quarters combat.

I keep such a shotgun in an undisclosed but easy to find location for me, and every time I wake up during the night to answer the call of nature, I also take my Maglite and shotgun outside to do a perimeter sweep of my yard. This morning at 3:45 am, I don't know who was the most shocked and surprised to discover one another, me or the 10 deer eating the grass only a few feet off of my back porch. Now that we have discovered a hot pepper spray to keep the deer out of my tomatoes, I'm satisfied to let them live.

In closing, we just finished our one month trapping program of known predators to either quail or quail eggs, and it was very successful this year.After looking at the numbers, I have surmised that possums are as stupid as they look since we caught 178 of them in only a month. My two trappers were delighted to report that they did not catch a single skunk which is also a big nest predator. I'm just not real sure how hard they tried to catch any skunks.

We are having a good late spring. The woods look real good at this stage of the game, and we are about three weeks away from beginning to harvest sweet corn. We hope y'all are doing well also!