SNAKE! IN THE GARDEN! Thought you ought to know...

10 points if you know that reference! Here's a hint: replace "snake" with "troll" and "garden" with "dungeon." Answer: Harry Potter book one. Quirrel says it. At this point I'm ashamed if you didn't get it. Go read all 7 books. Start right now.

Back to the point of this post. WE FOUND A SNAKE IN OUR GARDEN! Like I mentioned in a previous post, we ended up with quite the tomato plant jungle because our coat hanger cages weren't actually strong enough to hold up the plants and we didn't do any sort of pruning. It got to the point where they were flopping over and smushing our other plants, so we decided to intervene.

We gathered up some sticks. This is substantially more difficult here than it is back East. We had to walk along the nearby wilderness trail for a while to find sticks that were the size we wanted that weren't infested with termites. We got to work using the sticks to prop up the plants.

BUT THEN!

Aaron pulled aside a bunch of tomato branches, and from where I was standing, I could see a snake! So I did a little yelp and yanked Aaron back. The snake was curled up and apparently asleep- he wasn't flicking his tongue out or anything. It wasn't a huge snake, but it was hard to tell with him all curled up. I wish we had thought to take a picture, but we were filled with battle rage. Aaron grabbed some gloves and our big shovel and I held the branches out of the way. Aaron had a pretty clear shot and the snake was kinda cornered. And asleep. So we felt pretty good about our chances of not being bitten. If it had been awake, we probably would have called the fire department to come get him.

I'll spare you the details of the battle. It was rather one-sided and ended with the snake half buried. It did hiss at us a little after we thought it was already dead, but a few more whacks put an end to that. Aaron moved the dirt around to bury him the rest of the way.

We never got a good look at it's tail- it was covered while he was asleep, and we didn't feel the need to dig him up enough to look at it after the fact. Going off of the coloring, it could have been a rattle snake, but we can't say for sure. There are some other non-venomous snakes with similar patterning. Aaron prefers to think that it was a non-venomous one so that he can tell himself that we don't have to worry about the snakes' brothers and sisters lurking nearby. I get a kick out of thinking that we fought off one of these guys:

Lesson learned- don't stick your hands into places that you can't see!