I spent the first half of yesterday canning tomatoes. Got 4 quarts, plus enough left-overs to make a batch of macaroni & tomatoes for tonight's supper. I think this makes about 14 quarts of tomatoes in the pantry. That ought to be enough for a winter's worth of chili, soup, etc.
The sill on one side of the back porch is still lined with tomatoes that weren't quite ripe enough to can. Nanny still wants to can more tomatoes, so I'll take these to her when they're ready.
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It was SO HOT yesterday. When the canning was done, I attempted to pull some weeds from the flower bed at the back of the house, but that didn't last long. I'd learned from a Facebook gardening group that one of the weeds in the flower bed is pigweed, and when I went outside to compare it with a picture in the post, I discovered that it was blooming. A farmer had told me last year that pigweed is invasive and almost impossible to kill with herbicides. It had to go. I pulled up all I could find in that one bed and stuffed it in the garbage can. There may be more of it in other beds, but the sun was beating down so hot on my back that I gave up after cleaning out the one bed.
As I was cooling off under a fan on the back porch, The Husband came out. Almost immediately, I heard him give a little gasp and say, "Groundhog!"
I jumped up from my chair and said, "Where?!" but the groundhog - if that's what it was - had already disappeared down the gulley.
A few years ago, the gulley started caving off, eating up our back yard. We spent a good bit of money having a dirt/concrete fill brought in to stop the erosion. The thought of animals burrowing into that fill puts me on edge. I said, "It's probably got a burrow in the gulley. We've got to get rid of it. You've got to kill it."
The Husband said, "Maybe we can trap it and haul it off."
Thus began the Groundhog Quest.
The Husband did a little research and discovered that groundhogs are vegetarians, so he decided to bait the live trap. We set it up in the area where he'd seen the beast, and baited it with tomatoes and watermelon. We also set up the trail camera to capture the capture on film.
And we waited.
Off and on all evening, The Husband checked his phone, which can receive live feeds from the trail cam. Nothing.
About 10 p.m., we went out to the porch for one last trap-check before we went to bed. The Husband picked up a spotlight that we keep handy for wildlife viewing at night. He shined it on the trap.
A possum was in it.
I didn't want to "off" the possum; they're said to eat a lot of ticks. So we decided to turn it loose.
Un-trapping a possum is way harder than trapping one. When we finally got the trap open (by pushing down on the mechanism with a sturdy stick), the possum would not come out. I picked up the end of the cage and tried to dump him out, but he clung to the wires and would not let go. Finally, he turned in the right direction and scampered out of the cage and over the hill.
The trail cam did not catch the possum being trapped, but it did catch us trying to un-trap him.
I'm not showing you that. :)
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