Monday, August 26, 2024 A Two-Toad Rescue Kind of Day

It will not surprise you to learn that water fountains attract toads the way lights attract moths. At night when it’s quiet we can hear the hum of frogs and toads making their nighttime music. It seems sometimes like they’re everywhere around us, but in truth, we don’t see them very often. So today was a banner day, a two-toad rescue day.

I could see from our window upstairs that two of the little fellas had jumped into our “pond” and discovered (as they all do) that they couldn’t get out again. Toads have died in our fountain before and they probably will again, but not this day. The Lord had appointed unto me this small task of stewardship and I was not going to neglect it.

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Other than insects, the only other victims that have fallen prey to our fountain have been mice, probably two of them over all the years. Would I rescue a mouse if it was still swimming along instead of belly up? Gosh, that’s a hard question. I hope I never have to answer it.

In other yard-related news, the deer have expressed a great delight in the hollyhock salad bar we’ve set out for them. We had protected our two hollyhocks for awhile, but there seemed to be no point in keeping them caged up, so the cages came off and the deer said, “Thank you very much!” I don’t think hollyhocks are destined to be a part of our perennial garden, sadly.

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I also took the cage off of our sunflower this morning. Will it suffer the same fate as the hollyhocks tonight? I took a parting photo just in case. If we remember we’ll put some deer scram over and around it to see if that helps. If not, that’s the way the sunflower gets eaten, I guess. Next year we plan to put black-eyed Susans and purple coneflowers in that spot. We want to have the kind of garden that says to any deer that are passing by, “Keep going – there’s nothing to eat here.”

If this blog post doesn’t survive the night, that’s the way the post gets deleted, I guess.

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