Flashback Friday

As the garden harvest months pass, I have lots of thoughts of our Connecticut garden. For a variety of reasons we haven't built our garden here yet, and I really miss having one. To choose today's Flashback picture it was nice to look through my photos of those three summers (yes, there were only three; we lived there for four summers but we didn't build our garden until the second year) with that vegetable garden. I chose the picture of the peaches because, as you might remember, the squirrels robbed us of almost all of our peaches. And they're busy again here in St. Louis. They have torn down all three of our bird feeders and they are madly eating or storing (I'm not sure which) as many walnuts as they can find. I don't mind this, except that while they're in the trees processing the nuts from the shells, they rain shells down on our driveway and deck. For a full week under one of our walnut trees they were so loud it sounded like a rain forest. And it's an absolute mess - and hazard. (And, according to my Google research, such frenetic behavior is a possible sign of a hard winter to come.) Though nothing that a little sweeping doesn't fix - and by "little" I mean I filled multiple snow shovels-worth of walnut shell droppings. As for the bird feeders - they broke our only squirrel-proof feeder (it had springs that prevented the squirrels from accessing the feed holes, and those clever squirrels not only broke the springs but they took off with them!) and managed to rip the other two feeders off of the fishing line from where they were hung - and they broke the fishing line in doing so. We have decided to try a new approach, so we ordered a high-tech squirrel-proof feeder called the Yankee Flipper. It has a motor that's activated by the weight of a squirrel, and once activated it will spin and fling the squirrels off. Once it arrives, I'll probably be inspired to write a post if it does the job it's supposed to do. And if it does, then maybe it's time some ingenious person invents a fruit tree version!