There are many animals that live in Dawn Gardens including my cat, Sweetie; ducks; fish; frogs; birds; squirrels; bats; snakes; gophers; moles; voles; snails & slugs; worms and insects. Outside the fence are deer, mountain lions, wild pigs, raccoons, skunks, foxes, possums and beavers.
Most of these animals are hard to get pictures of because they are nocturnal but here is what I have now:
My cat, Sweetie, ready to pounce on a gopher.
Dead gopher. Gophers always make mounds of soil and eat plant roots. Moles make tunnels just below the ground and disturb the soil but do not eat plants; they eat worms, grubs and other soil animals. I don’t bother with moles but I do put poison in the tunnels of gophers if my cat is not doing her job.
I did have 7 koi in the top pond but a Herron ate all of them except this one. Now he is too big to eat.
Herron that eats the koi.
Jesse stocks the ponds with gold fish.
Jesse sets the bag of gold fish in the pond for an hour until the temperature equalizes.
The bag is emptied and the fish find their new home. They will eat the mosquito larvae and the algae and keep the pond clean.
My neighbor gave me another koi which you can see in these videos. It is the orange one with the angel-like fins.
Bees are abundant at Dawn Gardens. A neighbor down the road a half mile has 100 bee hives.
Bees love the rockroses and the Lavenders.
Butterflies love the flowers.
The deer are the reason that I had to build an 8′ tall fence around the 8 acres. They would eat almost everything.
Tomato hornworm damage
Tomato hornworm
Grasshopper damage
Turkeys make a mess with the mulch as they are looking for worms and grubs.
Ducks laid 10 eggs in their nest in the rushes at the bottom pond on May 7, 2022. Unfortunately the eggs didn’t hatch.
Another pair of ducks came in 2023 and laid these eggs.
They all hatched but within a week the wild animals got them all.
Bark damage by sapsucker birds.
Damage by leaf cutter bees
Aphids on Hellebores
Ladybug loves to eat aphids
Lacewing egg sack will produce many lacewings which will devour aphids in the garden.
Preying Mantis eating a fly.
Scale on Spirea stems. The adult scale is stationary and brown and is sucking the sap from the stem. The baby scales are white and can move around on the stem. This insect causes loss of vigor and can eventually kill the host plant.
Soil mealybug causes loss of vigor in garden plants as on this Jerusalem Sage. The white cottony like material on the roots sucks the juices out of the roots.
The nymphs (baby mealybugs) crawl over the leaves before they go to the roots.
The Elm Leaf Beetle defoliated this Camperdown Elm every year until my tree man, Jerome, suggested that I treat it with injections of Ace Caps.
Caterpillar and leaf damage
Inchworm
Inchworms on Oxydendron
Rose slugs which are sawfly larvae, skeletonize the leaves.
Slug eating mildew on leaf
Tent caterpillar on Arbutus ‘Marina’
Tent caterpillars on Penstemon
Red dragonflies at the lower pond like to flit about laying eggs on the water.
Rattlesnakes usually hide under rocks and in pipes. They eat gophers and mice and slither away from people and animals unless they are cornered.
Frogs in the garden
The above video is here to let you hear the frogs at Dawn Gardens. Turn on the sound and listen to the noise of the frogs in early evening in March.
Listen to the many birds in the garden early in the morning. (Turn up your sound.)
I put this birdhouse up on the pump house as an ornament and now the birds are actually using them.
