Date Night in the (Old) Jeep

The ground squirrels have returned.

I happened to glance out my office window yesterday morning and spotted one in the front yard. The husband immediately went out onto the porch with the shotgun and took a shot at it but didn’t kill it. It disappeared down a hole. I am hoping he wounded it and it crawled away to die, because we didn’t see it again. Hopefully that served as a warning to others.

He finished assembling the rest of the raised beds in the garden yesterday and filled them with dirt. He’ll spread the remaining gravel around them today. While he was doing that, I planted the beds that were ready. I may end up moving things around after plants grow a bit and I have a better idea of how the overall layout looks, but for now, the plants are in the beds.

I was able to re-create some of my original herb garden because many of those plants had escaped into the yard and woods. I dug up yarrow, violets, sweet woodruff, lemon balm, columbines, and echinacea and moved them to the beds. I have horehound, catmint, salvia, and poppies over in the big garden and those will get moved as well.

Some of the beds he built yesterday will get lettuce and some will get the overflow of stock that never made it into the big garden because I ran out of room.

Guess who kept me company while I planted?

I think this is Chicken Coop Snake. It gets around. It hung out at the edge of the garden for a while. I left to get more plants from the nursery down the road, and the husband reported that while I was gone, he watched it move from this spot over to the compost bins.

I spotted Strawberry Bed Snake again and also a snake out in the woods. This seems to be a good year for snakes. I am not unhappy about this. I just wish they ate ground squirrels. We need some gopher snakes. They are native to Montana, although I have never seen one here.

Someone posted footage on social media of a smallish grizzly bear in our neighborhood. Too bad they don’t eat ground squirrels, either.

We decided at the last minute to go out for dinner, and by some amazing stroke of luck, we were able to get reservations for two at Mercantile Steak, which is our favorite place to eat in Kalispell. We are not the only people who like to eat there. Getting a reservation is sometimes difficult.

The husband drove us to town in his Jeep.

He brought it back on a trailer from his dad’s place in Colorado. It is the same age as DD#1 (she’s 31). The husband did some work on it and it’s running fine.

Dinner was awesome. Mercantile Steak always starts the meal with popovers with herb butter, which are not on my diet but I make an exception when we eat there. We like to get mushroom toast as an appetizer. The husband ordered smoked prime rib for his entree and I had the scallops with roasted vegetables. (I prefer seafood to steak.) We topped it off with huckleberry cheesecake for dessert.

Rain is in the forecast again for the next couple of days, and then things dry out and warm up toward the end of next week.