Harvesting Time

Well the crows have said the end of the growing season is here - they are ravaging the dried corn field and daily cover the ground and the powerlines near our home.

From the powerlines they see us head towards the fields where they squawk their warnings - not just to their own but to the racoons & deer which have come to join them on their feast.

The deer are really getting on my short list though ... we had one wonderful pumpkin grow - it was going to be HUGE, maybe 10 lbs ... actually I can exaggerate all I want since the deer have taken their toll on it

UHHHGGG!!!!

the kids aren't too pleased with it right now either

they were looking forward to not only decorating it for halloween but putting it up afterwards to make the Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.

actually it would never have made it for pie - it was soft on one side for some reason, like the skin hadnt hardened off yet.

but I have decided to leave a few plants up yet instead of pulling it all out -

some of the summer squash plants were still alive and kicking even through the cold spells we were experiencing ... so I thought I'd give them a little more time to grow - after all it wasn't going to hurt the garden any really.

my daughter found a hitchhiker on one of the harvest sacks ... but we don't quite know what it means:

I know they say you can tell the winter by the thickness of the band on the back of the teddy-bear catapillar ... but what the heck does it mean when it doesn't have a stripe????