Cold blooded neighbors

This weekend, we turned our homestead into a campground and hosted my sister, brother-in-law, nieces, nephew and another sister for the weekend. We had a great time. Although there was some blood loss due to a bike wreck and a rooster attack (apparently even Reynaldo has a breaking point, and the kids inadvertently found it), no limbs or lives were lost, so we can count it a success. Even with all of the added activity, my two cold blooded neighbors made several appearances and even allowed the kids and myself to sneak in close for photos. Here is our frog (which I have determined is most likely a pickerel frog, not a leopard frog as I initially thought, please comment if you think otherwise)..


and the garter snake living in our compost pile.


The garden is finally all planted. I think this means that I get a brief interlude before the mad house of harvest season kicks in, but I can't seem to shake this nagging feeling that I'm forgetting something. There's still the regular chores of harvesting strawberries (yum!) and weeding but the sense of urgency has faded for the moment. Nature has been kind enough to keep our garden watered fairly regularly in the past few weeks. Just today we've gotten the gutters replaced on the back of our house after the winter snows took them down. Now we can start bulking up on our rainwater stash for later in the summer when the rains are not so predictable.