Leap Day 2008 - Birds, Sunflowers, etc

My sister Pat suggested this posting, and since it has warmed up to a balmy 9 degrees, I figured, what the hell.

When we first moved to our home on the Cook Road, the garden was located where it is now, but it had been neglected for several years. I took most of the spring to cut brush and a few 6-8 inch trees to open it up. There was also an old collapsed sheep wire fence that had to be dug out in places, along with rusted sap buckets, which I assumed that the previous owner had used for plant covers, and just left them when he got sick of gardening. After much effort and brush burning, I finally managed to till up the 50X50 plot where my present garden is.

There were a million things I had to do around the house and garage, and knew I wouldn’t have time to do the type of gardening I wanted to, so I finally sowed the whole thing to sunflowers. I figured it would be easy to till between the rows, which I laid out at 3 feet apart, and I would be able to keep the garden in shape, and move the rocks which had shown up when I tilled. This worked out very nicely, and I had a splendid crop of sunflowers going in no time at all. The sunflowers finally blossomed, and I found out later that my garden had become a land mark. Various folks told me that when they were given directions to somewhere in our area, one of the instructions was “go down past the sunflowers and turn left (right, whatever).”

Later that summer, we had a family gathering for some reason or other, and my sisters were always coming over to get together. My sister Penny from Syracuse was staying with us, and sister Pat was a regular visitor (and beer drinker). One morning I got up and looked out to check my sunflower crop and couldn’t believe my eyes. The girls had went out either in the evening or early in the morning and painted faces on all the sunflower heads with black spray paint. They had done a thorough job, and the sunflowers sported smiles, frowns, and every nuance in between. What made it even more ridiculous was that the flowers would face the house early in the morning, and then slowly turn during the day to follow the sun. At noon or so, they would all be facing the road. I was sure that my neighbors were convinced that I had finally lost my mind completely, and I spent a lot of time naming the guilty parties on the numerous occasions when my unusual sunflower patch was mentioned.

These days, I still plant a patch of sunflowers, which always remind me of the above nutty sunflower story. When I plant them, I till up a spot and broadcast a handful or two of the seeds we have been feeding the birds over the winter. I run over the new seeding with the rototiller (shallow), and thin as necessary when the plants come up, a quick and easy way to plant with little risk of failure. I don’t have any pictures of this episode, we did not own a digital camera when it happened. There are probably a few of the old-fashioned pictures around, but I have not figured out how to successfully scan them into my picture folder.

To compensate for my lack of plant pictures, I am attaching a picture of a very unusual bird which comes to our porch feeder. I have not been able to identify it from my field guide, but maybe one of my readers can help out.