Friday, July 15, 2011

It's Blueberry Season!

I went to visit the folks at the mountain house last weekend (friends of mine that are renting my homestead in the mountains).  We hung out for a while, and they showed me that the blueberries near the house are starting to ripen.  Then I showed them the blueberry hill, where there's a lifetime supply of berries if only they could all be picked in a month.  We picked and picked and picked and picked, and I got to go home with the booty. 

Now, these are wild highbush blueberries that have been unsullied by human contact for nigh on 20 years.  The berries are small-ish.  The bushes are tall-ish (as in it would be perfect if I were 8 feet tall).  Two of us picked for maybe 1/2 an hour and the booty was something like 2 cups of berries, which doesn't seem like a lot.

But this morning I made blueberry pancakes and boy oh  boy were they good!  I'm going to make muffins with what's left and then invite myself back to their house to pick more!

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Am I Creating Addicts?

I so enjoyed watching hummingbirds feeding at my sister's house that I up and got a hummingbird feeder as soon as I got back from Oregon.  It didn't take the little dudes and dudesses long to find the thing, and I get a huge kick out of hearing them zoom up and watching them do the sippy, tilty thing.  Here's some pix.

The feeder's on the steps just outside the kitchen window.  Doesn't seem to bother the hummingbirdies and I get to sit at the counter and watch.


Now, I am not an experienced birder, so to me, this looks like the same bird.  (Every picture is a different feeding event - about 5-15 minutes after the last one.) If it's really one bird, this feller (or lady) is going to get too fat to fly one of these days.  Not to mention being dependent on me to feed her/him.  I'm concerned that maybe I shouldn't be feeding her/him.  Opinions?

Five minutes of google searching leads me to thinking that this is a female.  Apparently it has to be a ruby-throated hummingbird because those are the only ones found east of the Rockies.  Pretty cool!



I need to do something about the greenery around the house (that you can see in the first picture).  This is the year that I'm observing and not destroying, but it's becoming apparent that trimming is in order, if not outright removal of a thing or two.