Salad for the Baby Charlie?

I did work in the rock garden a little more today, but I'm going to wait on the report. I got sidetracked with other things that needed to be done.

Did I tell you about my baby woodchuck, er charlie? (My friend, Chuck, prefers that friends not take his name in vain.) A couple of weeks ago, there was a baby woodcharlie hiding under the edge of a blue tarp on the porch. I scared her off into the pine trees. On the way, she ran the gauntlet of all my wire cages around my plants. Not that she went around the cages which are primarily to deter deer. No, she just ran through them as if it were her own personal fun house. I have no idea if it's a girl or boy, but I'm going to call her Charlotte.

Last night she was camped in the flower bed. See her hiding?

Hiding turned out to be a big joke. I yelled at her and told her to scram. I clapped my hands and stamped my feet. Here's what she thought of all that. No, her head isn't striped. Those are shadows. I had to actually come at her with a stick in my hands to get her to run away.

Segue to today. I had to do errands. Blech. But one of them was to go to Tractor Supply and use a $10 credit before it expired. I figured I'd roam the aisles until I found something I wanted. Who knew they had plants? The remains of their inventory was on a clearance table in front, with gallon plants marked down to $1 each! Now, the selection wasn't huge, but hey.

I won't show them all today, but I got 6 perennials and 5 annuals for $1.06. (Had to spend OVER $10 to use the card.) At basically "free" I'm willing to add a little color to the front flower bed. There are 4 New Guinea Impatiens (will tolerate sun), and in the other pot there were 3 Gazanias and a surprise Coleus. None of the plants were super end-of-season stressed. There is still plenty of summer left that these should have nice blooms.

Well, that is, if I can keep Charlotte from eating them. She (or perhaps her rabbit friends) have eaten all the leaves off the wild violets. This isn't a huge problem. They will come back, but I was thinking they'd make nice foliage cover instead of bare dirt. Not if they are all stubs. Hmmm.

So, I had to deploy more wire cages to cover all the new plants. I now have so much wire draped over plants it's a little ridiculous, and I'm running out of scraps of wire. I'm considering a low fence that will keep Charlotte and her friends completely out of this bed. I have a roll of 4-foot chicken wire, but I decided I wasn't willing to have everything look quite that ugly. And it would be really difficult to get inside to weed. I've priced 2-foot wire, and it's not bad. I can still cover the hostas inside, which is the main thing the deer eat, and 2-foot should keep out the small critters.

My other big project of the day which kept me out of the garden somewhat is that I've made the final transition to the computer David gave me last year. I've really pushed my luck keeping the other computer alive. It's way past time to switch. I'd already gotten all the software updated and all my online accounts synced. Today, I did one more backup of all the files on the old computer and I'm blogging from the new one.

Whew. My usual MO is that the current computer crashes, and then I'm paying someone to try to recover things since the last backup. So I get a couple of points for doing it right this time.

See Snaky/Sneakey