Black kingsnakes in KY

I made a map of Kentucky showing confirmed E. Black kingsnake sightings by county. All of the sightings were taken from the Kentucky Dept. of Fish and Wildlife (last updated March 2003). Counties in red show confirmed sightings.



There may be other counties with this species that were either not reported, not verified, or reported to another agency (Herpetology magazine or some such). I'll continue my search another time and try to make this as comprehensive as possible. In the meantime, notice how the entire northern Kentucky region is unaccounted for. If they are this far north, they would have to have made it here somehow. Now I'm wondering what their migration patterns are, if any.

seeds and snakes

I guess I may have spoken a couple of days too soon. The tomatoes and peppers are mostly up now, about 80% germination I would guess. The Jimmy Nardello's are still trailing (1/3), but since this is my first time with them it may just be in their nature to take a couple of weeks, I don't know. Also, I would like to put the lights on the timer, which of course I can't find. I may buy another one today and set it up. As it stands now I either have to give the seedlings 8 hours of light (my regular office hours) and come up on weekends, or I have to leave the lights on all the time. Average daylight this time of year is about 12 hours.

We had our first snake sighting of the season today. A younger eastern black king was spotted along the front of the house. Now I have to worry a little about Dik and Dak -- Tom has adopted a family of ducks which he feeds regularly, and they hang around quite a bit this time of year. Maybe I should check to see if this species of snake eats eggs....

One side note to the snake sighting: Jodi Ferner tells me her husband John, who is a professor at Thomas More, can officially identify the snakes, not only confirming our own somewhat limited web research but allowing us to officially publish the sighting. If the map I read a few years back is still current by herpetological standards, that means we can single-handedly adjust the geographic borders of the snake's known region--which is kind of exciting to me. He's coming to visit tomorrow, but there's a chance of rain and we're not likely to see a snake again, but if I can track down the video I took from two years ago he may be able to verify from that.

Getting the season going

Jim comes home this weekend, and should be ready to jump back into gardening (in a real man's USDA zone!) after next week. I'm excited to have my old gardening buddy (a partner in grime, if you will) back again.

I somehow forgot to mention that I had started tomato and pepper seeds in my office last Sunday, probably because it was the same day I completed the strawberry beds. So it's been about 10 days since I planted the seeds, and I'm a little bit concerned. Usually we have better germination at this point, but total germination is about one third. The pepper seeds were donated by Jim this year, and the tomato seeds are from the same packets as last year's crop. Here's the rundown:

Riesentraube: 1/4
Amish Paste: 3/4
Brandywine: 1/4
Jimmy Nardello: 1/3
Chile: 0/3

I bought a pack of peat pots and planted 2-4 seeds in each, rather than starting in tiny cells, planting far more than we need, and having to transplant five weeks later into peat pots. The drawback is that I only sowed exactly enough for our garden, so there's little to no margin of error. If some of the pots simply don't produce anything we can always fill out the garden with store-bought plants in May. But I'd rather not have to.

As for the strawberries, they took very well to transplanting, and began producing blooms within the first week. Since there were two frames I decided to try an experiment, suckering the blooms off of the one to allow them time to get bigger, while leaving the other bed alone. All things being equal, we should get a larger harvest from the first bed, just a few weeks later.