Snowfall, Deer, and Happy Hour For The Blue Jays

   Mid-October!  Time flies when you're wrapping up the gardening season.  There is so much to do.

   An end to the tomatoes is in sight (thank Heaven), with only one small box of them left ripening in the kitchen.  After a bit of a drought, this was a big sauce year.  I canned about 36 L of sauce; that should do us at least a year.  The Ajvarksi peppers did well, so there are several bags of those, too, chopped and in the freezer. 

   A few days ago, I processed one of the North Georgia Candy Roasters and cleaned the seeds to save.  I'd forgotten just how much food is in one Candy Roaster squash!  There was enough to have in two batches of red lentil daal with plenty left over to make a soup, which I did yesterday.

   Yesterday morning was a nippy -10 C, though by mid-afternoon the sun was shining and the temperature had risen to 7 degrees C.  We had a healthy (and unexpected) snowfall on October 19th that not only stuck around for a few days, but was added to by subsequent rounds of flurries.  It felt strange that it looked so Christmas-y outside when Hallowe'en hadn't even come and gone yet.

 (We got another 3 inches or so on top of this.)

 

   The deer visits have slowed down now that there is almost nothing left in the garden to eat.  The last few visits have been from the same little family; mama and her two youngsters.  These pictures are from earlier this month (October 4th). They were taken at dusk on a misty day, through windows, with my basic little digital camera.  Forgive the disorderly (grungy? chaotic? lowbrow?) look of the place; we had just begun to dry out the frost-guard sheets, put away tools and pots, save the dahlia tubers, till the plots, etc.  A task that can take up much of the month of October.

(Click pictures to enlarge.)

 

 

 

  

 

 

   I had periodically heard, but rarely seen, blue jays in our area.  Usually, a sighting would involve spotting one flying overhead, calling loudly, heading to someone else's yard.  The spectrum of birds we see here seems limited to sparrows, magpies, crows, ravens, and occasionally Bohemian Waxwings, so I longed for a blue jay to linger.  

   Yesterday, I heard one calling.  It sounded nearby.  To our surprise, one had discovered the dried sunflower head R. had placed in one of our trees and was having his fill.  We discussed what they like to eat (in a nutshell - no pun intended -  they love peanuts).  R. made a small platform, installed it in the tree near the sunflower head, and then left to shop for peanuts.  He placed a handful on the platform when he got home, and we were curious to see if a blue jay would discover it in the coming days.

   Less than an hour later, we looked out to see the blue jay sitting on the platform with a peanut in his beak.  He took off with it, presumably to stash it somewhere, and made his way back.  He (and/or some of his buddies, though I think it was the same bird) repeated the process until the peanuts were gone.   The feeding platform was a hit!