Limes & Tiger Lilies and Berries, Oh My!!

Those of you who are familiar with the saga of 'MarkyBear Snickets'; the series of unfortunate events, which are buried somewhere back in our archives, dealing with the squirrels, may remember these two worthless 'scare owls'. (Those of you who are not familiar, please feel free to snoop around in our archive drawers and try on anything that may suit your fancy) Well, instead of throwing them out, as threatened, these two boys have been, as you can see, relegated to watching over one of the front door flower gardens, amongst the Johnny Jump-Ups, Mums, Tradescantias, and Gladiolas. In October, they had a scarecrow as a fellow sentinel, but his 'tour of duty' being up until next Fall, was sent to the shed to peer out of one of the windows, surrounded by camping equipment, gardening 'stuff', tools, and Cajun cooking accoutrement, all waiting their turn in the sun.
But, with the help of no-one watching over them, this little 4' x 12' square foot garden, which we planted a scant week ago already has green beans and cucumbers bursting up out of the soil. The apparent green bushes are tomato and pepper plants. Click on the picture to see a better close-up of the beans. Not to be outdone, another unguarded few little garden aka flower plots have more sweet peas hopping right up out of the soil, as well. Not wanting to terrify the owls, we never mentioned the soaker-hose snaking it's way around in the square foot garden.
The soaker hose. Ahhh, the soaker hose. We bought this soaker hose and another sprinkler that sways long arches of water back and forth over the lawn and garden. And I make fun of doze owls. Welllll. We got the hose going in the garden, which, no matter how hard we turned on the water, it only emitted tiny little drops, maddeningly slow, like small dripping beads of sweat. I went to band practice later, and the hose was still kinda/sorta threatening to get some of the soil wet. Well, for Pete's Sake! We decided, what da heck...since it hadn't rained in forever, if seemed, we'd leave it on all night; it for sure couldn't hurt anything.
We woke up late the next morning. Cappy got up and 'clicked the button on da coffee pot', then noticed to his horror, that the whole patio and drive-way was flooded! It was almost about to run out into the road. He raced outside to turn off the hose, then came back in shame-faced, having discovered one of our early, rising-at-the-crack-of-dawn neighbors had seen all the water, came over and turned it off. But thank God. Now we use it sparingly...when we are fully aware of our surroundings; fully awake having had our coffee, having our wits about us. Unlike what happened to the new sprinkler. I was backing into the driveway with a 'haul' from Home Depot. There was some kind of dispute about how far back I need to go. I was also worried about the dogs, who had run out of their doggie-door to greet us and who have no fear of the tires of any vehicle. So I was backing, and backing, then heard and felt "Crunch!" I shouted, "Oh no! What was THAT?? One of the dawgs??? Was that crunch his bones??" Cappy was not ruffled, and said, "no", but got out and found where I had backed over the sprinkler which I had just brought 'in' from way out in the yard before we had left for the store.
We two "yard geniusus" (ya like how I spelt that?)...are planning still more adventures. Cappy pulled up the kumquat tree for not behaving itself properly as a kumquat tree, so we are in the market for a lime tree to replace it. A key lime would be nice, but we aren't so sure they would do well in our environment. (Take that either way you want.) Cappy has always wanted Tiger Lilies. He said they are hard to come by, but we think we know now where we can obtain the critters. A couple of years ago, the birdies gaveth us blackberries, then just as we got our mouths all watered and ready to picketh them, the birdies taketh away the blackberries, and left little splotches hither and yon of same blackberries. Cappy wants to try again, but this time, buying the plants, putting them where WE want them, and covering them with netting so we get them this year. We've tried just about everything to keep lawn predators away from our garden goodies, exept a gun. And can't you just imagine that. You'd probably be reading our blog in the newspaper under the police report section.