Being deep in fall and with winter on the way, I’ve been collecting wild seeds from the surrounding yards for seed swapping and next year sowing. While my gardens aren’t producing an abundance at the moment, I’m rich with goldenrods, New England asters, evening primrose and morning glories.
During a warm-ish late afternoon, I paced around my garden with pruners and paper collection bags, snipping off whole stems of fluffy goldenrod flowers. My collecting isn’t perfect and many of the fluffiest seeds, goldenrod and asters especially, were blown into surrounding garden beds and paths. This imperfect harvesting will become obvious next season as new islands of wild flowers begin to immerge.
Along with asters, goldenrods and some upright lobelia inflata, things I planted like mullein, evening primrose and morning glory also gave up some seeds. These were in much smaller quantities but are more than enough for seed swapping among friends~
With the gardens now put to bed and waiting for whatever climate changed winter we’re going to get, I’ve gone deep into attracting birds to the property~ I had great success over the summer with hummingbirds and their insatiable lust for sugar water, and now being knee deep in suet feeders, my back garden is in a constant flurry of birds. 4 suet feeders, plus 1 loose seed feeder has been an immediate success and it’s been downright heavenly watching little finches and wood peckers mingle in the barren yard. I’m hoping I can keep up with their taste for lard and seed until spring as the more diversity I’m able to nurture, the healthier and more productive my gardens will be.
I’m also in the process of attracting crows to the homestead but that’s not been as easy or straight forward as setting out feeders, so more experimenting will need to be done~