Every garden has a snake–and how I handle mine

If you’ve been following my social media, you’ve been noticing that I’ve posted azalea pictures, ad nauseam.

I’m sorry. I just have beautiful azaleas, thanks to the elderly couple who lived in my house before I did.

I love gardens. I love to plant things. But I expect them to take over from that point and do the rest of the work themselves. I do not have the patience nor the skill to pass for an actual gardener, so when my plants are blooming and beautiful, you will see pictures of them. I’m not taking the credit, especially not for a bush. Bushes are the best–they thrive on neglect an an occasional pesticide.

But it’s spring gardening season, and that means I must extend my yearly warning about snakes.

Because every garden has a snake.

That’s a garden’s downside. Even though snakes eat mice, I loathe snakes. Even the harmless ones. They freak me out.

I have encountered snakes.  I have looked into their beety little eyes and been frightened beyond reason, even though I am 1000 times bigger. So I have killed snakes. Yes, I am a snake-killer. It must come from that fight-or-flight place because I am completely terrified by them.

I unfortunately have a few snake stories. Keep reading if you are interested. Actually, let me rephrase. Please read on for your own safety. In Virginia, we have three kinds of poisonous snakes: the copperhead, the rattlesnake, and the water moccasin. Our yards and gardens–even our little square suburb lots–often contain snakes, usually rat snakes (the long, black non-venomous ones) or copperheads (very venomous, especially the babies, which are hatching now.) Copperheads live near a water source or drain.

So here are my snake stories.

• THE COPPERHEAD IN MY KITCHEN. One summer, a copperhead slithered into my kitchen through a crack in the wall behind the stove (which we immediately fixed afterwards). It moved into the space between the counter and the island. Sensing my sons in the room, coiled and prepared to strike. My sons considered their options for killing it and fortunately chose a shoe over a golf club, although I don’t like their odds with either option. One of my sons beat it to death from behind (an approach I’ve used myself). Being Millennials, they had the presence of mind to take a picture of it before they killed it, but as the events happed rather quickly, the picture is a bit blurry. This is a coiling pose. They can strike in a fraction of a second. Click here for action shots. All that to say, snakes are not shy about your territorial boundaries.
• THE BLACK SNAKES THAT KEEP SNEAKING INTO MY BASEMENT. Rat snakes are harmless but long and let’s face it–gross. Rat snakes have invaded our home a few times, so again, we’ve got some prevention issues. They have all been babies, so not huge, but again, yuk. My house’s basement is partially-underground, so its windows are basically at ground level. Once, a black rat snake came through an open unscreened window. Another time, a small snake poked its head through the window AC vent (then it ducked back out, and we turned the AC on). I think we’ve had one or two other occurrences, so let’s just say that I wear shoes down there in the summer. I have killed black snakes in the garden, too–cut off their heads with one violent swoop of the shovel–but I probably shouldn’t have. They weren’t hurting anything.
• THE KING SNAKE LOOSE IN MY HOUSE. My brother had a non-poisonous 36-inch long king snake when we were kids. He fed it live white mice every three days or so, which he kept in a carton in the basement. Mike would put the terrified mouse in the cage, and the snake would circle around it and squeeze. When the mouse was sufficiently frozen from fear and lack of air, the snake would eat it live, head-first. We would watch the lump go down the length of the snake, getting smaller as the snake digested it.  As fascinating a science lesson as that was, I kept a safe distance from the snake crate. One day, Mike apparently left the crate unlatched, and the snake escaped into the house. We had to go to bed not knowing where it was. My mom found it curled up under the sofa the next day. The snake eventually met its untimely death when squeezing a mouse to death because the mouse bit it in the neck. The mouse was swallowed, but the snake died. Mike cried, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
• THE COPPERHEAD IN MY TOOL SHED. I have posted this story (please read–it’s funny) regularly as a warning to everyone and honestly, as a tribute to myself. I was quick-witted and aggressively brave. Babies release more poison than adults; they are no joke. This event made me a bona fide snake-killer. Please read the story and be impressed. After I killed the copperhead, I took a picture of it and posted it on Facebook–for congratulations, of course–and someone put in a laughing emoji and replied that the snake was only the size of a worm, given its comparative size to a very large oak leaf nearby. This reductive assessment overlooked the important fact that this was a POISONOUS BABY COPPERHEAD, AND I KILLED IT.

Please heed some sage advice from a non-scientific snake expert (based on my previous experiences):

1. put down snake repellent regularly, all around your house and garden
2. get an outside cat
3. keep leaves and brush away from the house
4. make sure you keep up with the settling and maintenance of your house
5. don’t open windows near ground level
6. watch where you walk
7. wear loose pants and shoes when working in the yard, especially long grass or brush
8. keep your drainage systems flowing and the area around your house dry

Focus on the beauty of your garden, but don’t be reckless.

Kind of like real life.

I’m tempted to talk about the metaphorical snakes in our metaphorical gardens, so I’ll be brief. Suffice it to say–that when you encounter a snake in your life, you have a couple options:

• run away from it (but it will assume that it can stay)
• cut off its head with something that has a long handle (problem solved)
• beat it to death (problem also solved, with some aggressive satisfaction and a little more risk to you, given your proximity)

Killing invaders is a topic for another time. But it is a worthy topic. Because we all have snakes in our gardens.

For today, have a great non-snake day and enjoy the beauty all around you!