Lazy Germophobe

The last wildflowers of summer are blooming in Vermont. They are asters.     These purple ones have a yellow center.    The purple asters that bloom all summer, which do not have a yellow center, are called knapweed.   Knapweed is considered noxious and invasive—but the honeybees and bumble bees absolutely love it. And it blooms all summer long!   The knapweed is all brown now except for a few that grew back after getting mowed. The other wild aster blooming now is this delicate white one.   These purple and white asters, along with the goldenrod, are the last flowers we’ll see before the leaves start to turn—and the goldenrod is already going to seed. It’s almost foliage season.

Hi, I’m going to talk about mice again. It’s getting cold and they are coming inside. You might hear them scratching in your walls. Infuriating! However, do not try to kill them with poison pellets. Learn from my mistakes. Several years ago, one of my children dropped something into the living room couch, and it immediately slid down past the cushion. I fished around for whatever it was and came out with a handful of D-Con. Two days earlier, I had put a box of D-Con pellets in the cellar. They disappeared overnight, and I thought “Great! Die, mice!” I put out another box, and those pellets vanished too. Yes! Success, or so I thought. But the mice hadn’t eaten those pellets, they had hoarded them. Who hasn’t stumbled across a stash of hoarded food in a box somewhere in the garage or attic? Corn, sunflower seeds, cat food, stashed away for a rainy day by industrious mice. I never realized they might do the same with the D-Con pellets. They had some nerve bringing the poiso...