Things I have found in my backyard

[zdashamber]

• The top half of a domed litterbox
  
• A push mower that weighed about 30 pounds
  
• Redwood planks
  
• Many half-rotted other planks
  
• Dented drainage pipes
  
• A stone wall, fitted together and then buried under two inches of soil
  
• Calfornia Slender Salamanders
  Man, these things are weird. I love herps, but you turn over a piece of carboard or something and there's this scaly grey-brown worm with tiny little legs... Stare a bit, "Oh, sorry about that," put some cover back because it'd probably be extremely tasty for a bird, feel a bit smug that Your Big Backyard supports medium-high animal life.
  
• A bed frame
  
• Two pairs of venetian blinds
  Baby-shit blue. I mean... Venetian blinds? In the backyard where they'd get rained on and have things growing in them? Bwa?
  
• Three extra five-gallon buckets
  Note, not "three buckets". No, this is all stuff I've discovered without any inkling it might be there. If you'd asked me how many buckets were in the backyard I'd've said, "Um, three? Maybe four?" Try six. Or maybe seven, I might have found one and then lost it again. One of these buckets is actually made of metal with a metal lid with picadills and everything. (Thanks to mr_nice_gaius for reminding me with his costuming posts what that kind of fringe-y thing was called.) Anyway, this is not wholly bad... I have this guy's attitude towards buckets. (Delbert Trew! Awesome!) Parts are bad, though.
  
  • A bucket full of car oil
    This shocked my housemates, but at the time I'd taken it as a given, ~Oh of course among all this junk there are toxic chemicals that someone was too lazy to take to, well, anywhere since every car shop recycles oil... Of course I find it by kicking it over because I'm eradicating mosquito breeding grounds, pouring toxic chemicals onto the ground I might've wanted to put vegetables in, or, you know, any sort of plant...~ But fortunately, I picked it up again before much of it sludged its way out, and it was dumping onto the random grass that doesn't seem to die. Anyway, the housemates pointed out: why a bucket? You can't fit a bucket under a car. I found the answer some months later, when I found a shallow oil-collecting plastic dish, which couldn't have held a car's-worth of oil.
    
  • A bucket full of god only knows what
    I opened it, I decided I'd send it to hazardous waste recycling with the other bucket, I closed it.
    
  • A bucket full of god only knows what, which turned out to be dirt or ashes, I think
    It was something grey-brown and clumpy below a surface of clearish liquid. I left it in the sun for a couple days and then happened to see little nymphs skimming around in the liquid, so it was clearly not toxic enough, so I dumped over the bucket.
    
  • A newt
    ...I got better. So, having beaten down the grasses and yanked aside the UN's Venetian blinds, I uncovered a bucket full of driftwood redwood logs and black liquid and packing peanuts. Coming back a later, less daunted day, I started lifting the logs out one by one to see whether the black liquid clung to them like more car oil. Clinging to a log: A newt! OMG! It was so amazing! All black and speckly! Newts that we would have paid good money for in a store, living wild in my backyard! I stared for a moment, then put the log back in the bucket. The newt swum-dashed behind the other logs. I left it alone for more days, and it went its way.
    (*Note: was almost certainly a juvenile arboreal salamander. I'd thought of salamanders as either more scaly, or more liable to live near actual water so they could go through metamorphoses.)
  
  
• A plum tree that produces tasty plums despite being ignored completely
  At least, the unripe plums were darn tasty and I bet if I could ever get there before the squirrels the ripe plums would be tasty, too.
  
• Two complete working large rabbit cages
  
• A cherry tree, identified from the remnants thrown to the ground by squirrels, probably makes yellow sweet cherries
  
• A cherry tree bravely growing from one of these aforementioned pits (still probably young enough to move, come fall: anyone want a cherry tree that will survive the kind of neglect we're discussing here?)
  
• The aforementioned black widow
  
• Poison hemlock
  badgerbag came to my house to trade iris for avocado, and I showed her the jungle of the backyard, and said, "Oh, I just saw this, is it wild carrot?" "No, that's poison hemlock." Um! Oh! Good to know, then!
  
• And, as ever, the crazy All Your Base Are Belong to Us wild blackberry that can never be killed if it but once gets started. I've ceded the grill to it. I like blackberries more than trying to light fires outdoors.

Comments

[kathryn-ironic.livejournal.com]

ohhh, slenders.
I remember the first time I found them in my yard- it took a moment to figure them out... worms? fast little worms? too fast. tiny snakes? Salamanders!

They've meant that I've given up on getting rid of the oxalis weed, though, as it'd be too disruptive (not to mention an impossible goal. Imagine if blackberry produced hundreds of bulblets each year.)

This year, I found one by its egg.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Oooo. What kind of eggs do they have?

I was sanguine about oxalis, because it's pretty and tasty, but it also seems to die off every summer and leave an icky dirt patch. Loses it quite a few points.

[jamused.livejournal.com]

According to an article I just read, apparently the solution to blackberry brambles is goats. These remorseless eating machines can be rented for precisely this purpose. I know you said you're happy with the blackberries where they are, but I just thought the whole rent-a-goat thing was too cool not to pass on.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

At Berkeley one of the guys in the dorm had grown up vegetarian in Oregon, and his parents had gotten a goat to mow their area and provide milk... We gave him a lot of crap about all of that. Tofurkey. Hee.

[npbrpg.livejournal.com]

Look what I found because of you:



Cool photos! LOLNewts anyone?

[badgerbag.livejournal.com]

I love that sort of yard. I moved into a house once that had a whole weird shack in the back - a greenhouse with its plastic mostly eroded away - and someone's stuff in there - not all their stuff, but a good bunch of it, all boxes of personal letters (rained on and moldy) and hand-made pottery (I still have and use the mugs) and little arty things and keepsakes. Her name was Jane and I wondered if she had died or gone crazy .... to have forgotten all these personal treasured things. Finding it in the yard was sort of like being in "Mandy" where she finds the Shell House but less thrilling of a result.