I like creeping charley also, and it doesn't really go away as much as lie flat below my mower blades. Right now it is blooming, and there are big patches of purple out in the yard. I don't have a mono-culture lawn ever. I do try to take out the thistles before they get so tough and monstrous that it takes a spade fork to dig them out and they leave behind a hole large enough to cause sprained ankles.

Crickets down here are not exactly a blessing. Where I grew up, in the Pacific Northwest, you heard but never saw them. Down here, you see them all over, and you hear them all night. Usually when one of the little bastards has made camp in a shoe in the closet and you can't find it because any time you turn on the light the little bugger shuts up again. I rely on the cats to ferret out most of them. I have few crickets now at this house because I have well-established tarantula colonies in the yard. They are marvelous! I also don't have any roaches. I have been checking the porch walls for the first sign of our little Mediterranean house geckos. I have lots of native snakes and lizards, big fat roly-poly toads, some lizard cousins to the horny toads of Texas fame, and a large number of birds that come through the brushy part of the yard. And then there are the water birds that hang out in our part of the creek. Coyotes come through, probably looking for the bunnies that live nearby. We have a red fox that yips up a storm across the road.

Ah, spring! I do love watching this parade come through the yard!

SRS