Lately, other than being impoverished via my job at Tuesday Morning LLC, I have been waging a war against my “green cancer” of a lawn. I have successfully removed about one-quarter to one-third of the lawn in my backyard in order to replace it with a much more productive, enjoyable and ecologically friendly vegetable garden and “cat jungle”. I have basically been tearing the turf right out. All the sod produced by this is far to heavy to be thrown in the garbage can like my neighbors do. Thankfully I live close to a greenbelt with a small creek. My neighbors always dump hundreds of thousands of sticks and pounds upon pounds of dry plant material in huge heaps on the steep banks of that creek. One neighbor has been placing his refuse specifically to deny access to the creek from land he does not own. So, I dumped all the sod right on top of the sticks and branches with the idea of compacting them down so that people can have access to the creek again. Well, today I used the sod steps and noticed something amazing at the base of the sod/branch mounded embankment: garter snakes. There were probably ten or fifteen basking themselves on the branches that protruded from the bottom of the mound. When they saw me they quickly slithered back into the sod mound. I have decided to stop using the sod mound as steps at least until spring brings the warmth back in order to avoid crushing any snakes under the mound. So my efforts have not only improved my yard but have also provided a warm sod house for snakes to live in this winter. The branches at the bottom prevented the sod from reaching all the way down creating a perfect entrance to the sod snakehouse and they also create the actual pockets under the mound that the snakes actually live in, the dirt in the sod will act as a thermal insulator and the rotting grass will provide extra heat. The same jerk neighbor has also erected a chain-link fence extending from his legal property all the way to the creek’s water line to keep people from walking around down in the creek. It really isn’t too hard to swing yourself around it to get to the other side so I’m thinking of using it as a guerilla gardening trellis in the spring and if he sabotages that, his chain-link fence may have to perform a magical vanishing act.