Toads

[maryannb]

I must have 500 toads on my back porch. I am not complaining, but it is really creeepy. Does anyone else have this situation and can anyone explain it? I have been organic for about 15 years and have never had this many toads around my home.

[sandih]

Do you have a water feature? If not, I bet someone around you has a pond. I went to the E.Dallas Garden tour last weekend and noticed in one pond hundreds of tadpoles which will eventually be toads or frogs on that couples deck.

I don't know how to suggest you get rid of them, but you certainly won't have a bug problem with them around.

[Larry Sharp]

It is that time of year!!

Yes, perhaps not 500, but my dogs and cats have been having a field day!

2 years ago there were very few, after all the rain we got last year we were covered up with them. :D

[northwesterner]

I don't know how many types of toads we have in North Texas (I tried looking up the variety in my garden recently and didn't find a conclusive answer) but you may want to chase your pets away from them. Some of those toads can make dogs sick if they try to munch them. My dogs seem to have figured out that while toads may be interesting to chase, they don't taste good (and I typically chase the dogs away from toads, so maybe they just got the message.)

We enjoy the game of catching June bugs and tossing them to the toads around the porch under the porch light. Actually, we also toss June bugs to a variety of spiders that will come along later and sling far-reaching webs every night. If you do it just right, you can snag the bug in the body of the web. It usually doesn't work more than once because they can't eat more than the one bug and the web tension is broken with the first bug hit. (We're easily entertained over here in Fort Worth.)

Northwesterner