A recent issue of Birds& Blooms magazine stated that a survey conducted by a major seed company said that you could grow $2500 worth of vegetables from $100 spent on seeds and fertilizer. Another item in the same issue asserted that the author of a book on gardening said that he estimated that he saved $100 a week for the eight months out of the year that he grows vegetables. When I read this I was reminded of the following lines from an old song by The Who:
It all looks fine to the naked eye
But it don't really happen that way at all.
Now I'm not going to tell you that I've conducted any studies that refute these assertions but, come on! Who buys $100 a week worth of vegetables and herbs? I bet my wife and I don't spend half that in the months when we don't have something ready to harvest in the garden, even when we buy things at farmers' markets, which are usually more expensive than the supermarket. To save $100 a week by vegetable gardening you would have to regularly buy enough vegetables in a week to cost $100 plus the money you spent for water, garden soil and amendments, seeds, plants, garden implements, insect control and everything else that you need to harvest that $100 worth of vegetables per week. As far as the other assertion, getting $2500 worth of vegetables out of a $100 investment in materials, I have to believe that would be under absolutely ideal conditions and probably in a greenhouse.
I've been growing my own vegetables for over forty years in two very different climate and soil zones and I sure haven't had results like those claimed in Birds and Blooms, and as a master gardener who deals with novices and other master gardeners on a regular basis, I don't know of anyone else who has had results like that. There are a tremendous number of variables at play when it comes to gardening and a lot of hidden costs. Every area of the country has different soil and climate conditions. The number of hours of sunlight available per day has a tremendous effect, especially on vegetables. The weather can vary tremendously from year to year and that affects things like the type and number of insects that attack the garden as well as the chances of developing a virus or other plant disease. The choice of varieties also comes into play. So the bottom line is that, if you start out as a novice gardener and expect to have the kind of results that I read about in Birds & Blooms, I think you are likely to be disappointed, and that's a shame.
I think when people start out with expectations of having great success at something and their result don't match their expectations, a lot of folks are just going to give up and not keep trying. I know that happens with novice gardeners because I have talked to some who have had that experience. That's the problem I have with articles and factoids like the two I mentioned above. I think it would be a lot better to start out with more reasonable expectations and smaller goals. So I tell novice gardeners to just start out with a few tomato plants of a variety that's known to do well in their area, and then build on the success they have with those. That's not as impressive as jumping right in and supplying all of your family's veggie needs from your garden right out of the gate, but it is much more likely to result in some degree of success.
I see a lot of parallels between gardening and retirement. Before my wife and I retired we looked at the lives of those folks we knew who were retired and thought that they really had it made. We (mostly I, I guess) also read a lot of articles and books about retirement. Some of them were kind of gloom and doom articles that counseled the soon-to-be-retired to save wads of money before taking the plunge. We didn't want to hear that so we tended to believe the books and articles that painted a rosy picture of retirees living large, spending their days playing golf, traveling and puttering around on their retirement hobby farms.
Then we retired and ran headlong into reality. It turned out that our expectations were unreasonable and that made us kind of disappointed with retirement in the beginning. We tried to do too much and made some financial decisions that put us into a one step forward, two steps back position for awhile. As a result I had to go back to work several times in the early retirement years. We didn't allow ourselves to give up on retirement though. We tried to learn from our mistakes and keep our plans as flexible as we could. We made the decision to cut back on things that didn't matter a lot to us and to spend our fixed income on the things that do matter to us. We adjusted our expectations to something more reasonable than those we had had when we planned our retirement. Just as in gardening, things improved over time and now we are enjoying retirement and, while we aren't living large, we are content with our life these days.
It seems to me that having reasonable expectations is one of the major keys to anything in life. It's great to have ambitious goals as long as you don't expect to achieve them overnight. If you do a little research and understand the work required to achieve your goals and then set a reasonable schedule to achieve them, you are much more likely to follow through to the end, especially if you assume up front that you are going to run into things you hadn't anticipated. Expect your results to be less than those claimed in any book or article you read, at least in the beginning of your endeavor, and stay flexible, and you'll get to where you want to be eventually.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Monday, April 18, 2011
Wildflowers, Fleamarkets and the Scrap Metal Fairy
April is wildflower time in Texas so Ellie and I opened the Adventure Book again this weekend and drove some of our favorite back roads to see the sights of spring. Usually the fields look like this:
This year, however, the fields were barren with nary a blossom to be seen. Sadly, that's what happens when we are in one of our frequent drought years and we are in one now.
The trip wasn't a total loss, though, because our ultimate destination was Fredricksburg Trade Days, a sort of flea market that is held once a month between Fredricksburg and Stonewall, Texas where you can find acres of "Antiques, collectibles, tools, crafts, shabby chic, primitives,ranch furniture, hunting accessories, candles, unique clothing, jewelry, food and so much more." The Trade Days is a pretty cool place if you like shopping for eclectic decorations and yard and garden art. Add free beer and free live music from The Drugstore Cowboys and it's a great way to while away a sunny (but damn windy) weekend.
Wandering through small town festivals, antique stores and flea markets is one of Ellie's and my favorite activities. My wife mostly looks for cheap primitive decorating items, either for the house or to add “whimsey” (her view; I don't quite see it that way) to her side of the garden. (OK, I should probably explain here that my old girl and I have way different views of how a garden should look. So after years of heated debates over what should and should not be in the garden, we divided the backyard into her half and my half. My half is pretty much intended to look as natural as possible while her half is full of “whimsey”.) Anyways... she scours thrift stores and flea markets for things she can turn into decorations. For me it's all about the condiments.
Condiments are one of the major exports of Texas. If you can't find a salsa, syrup, chowchow relish or pickle you like in a Texas gift shop or flea market then you are just too damn picky. Because if it can be made with jalapenos, habaneros, prickly pears, peaches, mangoes, agarita or whatever, we've got it here and, since I've never met a condiment I didn't like, I'm a happy guy.
It was about lunch time when we got to the flea market so we chowed down on brats and sauerkraut and free beer (at least in my case, Ellie's more of a Diet Coke afficianado) and listened to the Drugstore Cowboys for awhile. Then we hit the booths and barns for a couple of hours. Ellie got a vintage Easter tablecloth and some other decos and I picked up some herbs and a hanging tomato plant and a jar of Mrs. McArthur's Apricot-Pineapple Pepper Jelly. Our purchases show kind of the ups and downs of buying stuff at flea markets. My wife only paid $7 for the tablecloth, which was a big one in great shape. I paid the same amount for a little 16 fl. oz. jar of jelly. So she got a good deal and I probably paid more than I would have in a regular brick and mortar store; but like I said, I'm a condiment guy, so I'm not complaining.
One of the booths at the Trade Days had used, rebuilt garden equipment like tillers and such. I always wonder when I see these things if I didn't own one of them sometime in the misty past. See, I used to do all my own machine maintenance. When I had a tiller or edger or something that wasn't working, I used to tear the engine down and rebuild it. As I got older and went from regular glasses to bifocals to trifocals to progressive lenses, I found that it was difficult to see well enough to do a lot of the machine work that I used to do. So I'd end up shoving a non-working mower into the shed and going down to Wal~mart to plunk 125 bucks down on a new one. Eventually the shed got pretty well filled up with probably-still-good but not-working-right-now stuff.
Pretty soon the old girl and I started having some heated debates about the non-functional power tool collection. I tried to convince her that it was just "whimsey" but she wasn't buying it. So I thought about having a garage sale to get rid of it, but my experience with garage sales has been less than positive. Craig's List didn't appeal to me either for pretty much the same reason. So then I thought I'd just donate the old power tools to Goodwill or someplace; but then I discovered that most of those places aren't interested in whimsical gas-powered used-to-be-useable machinery. Finally, one night when I was putting out the trash, I decided to put a couple of old weed trimmers out to see if the trash man would take them. Bright and early next morning I went out to check on whether the trash man had decided to take my old power tools and what to my wondering eyes should appear but an overfull trash can with no power equipment near. It seems that someone else had picked up the old trimmers.
In the ensuing weeks I tried the same thing with an old lawn mower, another trimmer, a broken bandsaw and one of those heavy metal sprinklers that looks like a tractor and crawls along a hose (when it works). In each case the old tools disappeared before the trash man made his rounds. I had discovered the Trash Metal Fairy! I got all excited and tried a couple of times to stay up so I could see what this amazing creature looks like but each time I either fell asleep before he got there or didn't get up in time to catch him. The closest I got was a Christmas card from somebody named Raul that was taped to my trash can one morning after I had put out the bandsaw the night before. I don't know what the Trash Metal Fairy does with all my old power tools but whenever I go to a flea market I have to check out the used power tool booths just to see if some of my old stuff has been reincarnated there.
Ellie and I had a good time at the Trade Days but eventually we were shopped out so we decided to try one last time to see some wildflowers. We drove a short way down the road from the Trade Days to a place called Wildseed Farms where they grow wildflowers in order to sell the seeds. Usually that's a great place to see wildflowers but this year they only had one field of red poppies growing. So we bought a bag of seeds to grow our own flowers this fall and then we gave up the wildflower quest and headed home.
Even though we didn't see any wildflowers, it was still a fun adventure. Now I just have to find some french-fried mushrooms to eat with my apricot-pineapple jalapeno jelly.
The trip wasn't a total loss, though, because our ultimate destination was Fredricksburg Trade Days, a sort of flea market that is held once a month between Fredricksburg and Stonewall, Texas where you can find acres of "Antiques, collectibles, tools, crafts, shabby chic, primitives,ranch furniture, hunting accessories, candles, unique clothing, jewelry, food and so much more." The Trade Days is a pretty cool place if you like shopping for eclectic decorations and yard and garden art. Add free beer and free live music from The Drugstore Cowboys and it's a great way to while away a sunny (but damn windy) weekend.
Wandering through small town festivals, antique stores and flea markets is one of Ellie's and my favorite activities. My wife mostly looks for cheap primitive decorating items, either for the house or to add “whimsey” (her view; I don't quite see it that way) to her side of the garden. (OK, I should probably explain here that my old girl and I have way different views of how a garden should look. So after years of heated debates over what should and should not be in the garden, we divided the backyard into her half and my half. My half is pretty much intended to look as natural as possible while her half is full of “whimsey”.) Anyways... she scours thrift stores and flea markets for things she can turn into decorations. For me it's all about the condiments.
Condiments are one of the major exports of Texas. If you can't find a salsa, syrup, chowchow relish or pickle you like in a Texas gift shop or flea market then you are just too damn picky. Because if it can be made with jalapenos, habaneros, prickly pears, peaches, mangoes, agarita or whatever, we've got it here and, since I've never met a condiment I didn't like, I'm a happy guy.
It was about lunch time when we got to the flea market so we chowed down on brats and sauerkraut and free beer (at least in my case, Ellie's more of a Diet Coke afficianado) and listened to the Drugstore Cowboys for awhile. Then we hit the booths and barns for a couple of hours. Ellie got a vintage Easter tablecloth and some other decos and I picked up some herbs and a hanging tomato plant and a jar of Mrs. McArthur's Apricot-Pineapple Pepper Jelly. Our purchases show kind of the ups and downs of buying stuff at flea markets. My wife only paid $7 for the tablecloth, which was a big one in great shape. I paid the same amount for a little 16 fl. oz. jar of jelly. So she got a good deal and I probably paid more than I would have in a regular brick and mortar store; but like I said, I'm a condiment guy, so I'm not complaining.
One of the booths at the Trade Days had used, rebuilt garden equipment like tillers and such. I always wonder when I see these things if I didn't own one of them sometime in the misty past. See, I used to do all my own machine maintenance. When I had a tiller or edger or something that wasn't working, I used to tear the engine down and rebuild it. As I got older and went from regular glasses to bifocals to trifocals to progressive lenses, I found that it was difficult to see well enough to do a lot of the machine work that I used to do. So I'd end up shoving a non-working mower into the shed and going down to Wal~mart to plunk 125 bucks down on a new one. Eventually the shed got pretty well filled up with probably-still-good but not-working-right-now stuff.
Pretty soon the old girl and I started having some heated debates about the non-functional power tool collection. I tried to convince her that it was just "whimsey" but she wasn't buying it. So I thought about having a garage sale to get rid of it, but my experience with garage sales has been less than positive. Craig's List didn't appeal to me either for pretty much the same reason. So then I thought I'd just donate the old power tools to Goodwill or someplace; but then I discovered that most of those places aren't interested in whimsical gas-powered used-to-be-useable machinery. Finally, one night when I was putting out the trash, I decided to put a couple of old weed trimmers out to see if the trash man would take them. Bright and early next morning I went out to check on whether the trash man had decided to take my old power tools and what to my wondering eyes should appear but an overfull trash can with no power equipment near. It seems that someone else had picked up the old trimmers.
In the ensuing weeks I tried the same thing with an old lawn mower, another trimmer, a broken bandsaw and one of those heavy metal sprinklers that looks like a tractor and crawls along a hose (when it works). In each case the old tools disappeared before the trash man made his rounds. I had discovered the Trash Metal Fairy! I got all excited and tried a couple of times to stay up so I could see what this amazing creature looks like but each time I either fell asleep before he got there or didn't get up in time to catch him. The closest I got was a Christmas card from somebody named Raul that was taped to my trash can one morning after I had put out the bandsaw the night before. I don't know what the Trash Metal Fairy does with all my old power tools but whenever I go to a flea market I have to check out the used power tool booths just to see if some of my old stuff has been reincarnated there.
Ellie and I had a good time at the Trade Days but eventually we were shopped out so we decided to try one last time to see some wildflowers. We drove a short way down the road from the Trade Days to a place called Wildseed Farms where they grow wildflowers in order to sell the seeds. Usually that's a great place to see wildflowers but this year they only had one field of red poppies growing. So we bought a bag of seeds to grow our own flowers this fall and then we gave up the wildflower quest and headed home.
Even though we didn't see any wildflowers, it was still a fun adventure. Now I just have to find some french-fried mushrooms to eat with my apricot-pineapple jalapeno jelly.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Passport to Adventure
Ellie and I opened the Adventure Book this past weekend and had a one-tank adventure more or less courtesy of the Republic of Texas. See this year marks the 175th anniversary of the Texas Revolution. That's when Texas became an independent republic, that is a nation of its own, about ten years before it became a state of the good old USA.
To mark this seminal occurrence the state has scheduled several celebratory events at sites that are significant in the Texas war of independence. In order to encourage folks to visit these historic sites the state has issued a “Passport to Texas History”. This is a little booklet that tells a bit about each of the seven sites and also tells you what you should see while you're there. One of the sites that is familiar to most people is the Alamo in San Antonio. Other important sites are less well known. For example, while lots of people know the story of the Alamo, probably fewer of them have even heard of the San Felipe de Austin state historic site in East Texas where Stephen F. Austin established his original colony. When you visit a site on the list you get your passport stamped to show that you've been there. If you collect all of the stamps you get a souvenir of the 175th anniversary. So visiting all of the sites listed in the passport will enable Ellie and me to learn more about Texas history and have some adventures while we're at it.
We made our first stop on the Texas independence trail in February when we went to Washington on the Brazos, where the Texas declaration of independence was signed. That's where we picked up our passport. We spent the day touring the site, which is a Texas state park, watching reenactors and talking with the folks at the living history farm on the site. This past weekend we decided to visit Gonzales, where the revolution started.
We began our trip by driving to San Marcos for lunch at the Charles Cock House Museum Cottage Kitchen. Every Friday a different volunteer group puts on a lunch at the Cottage Kitchen for seven dollars per person. That usually includes an entree and a couple of sides as well as a drink and dessert. It's not a BOGO, but it's a pretty good deal and San Marcos is a great little college town with neat shops and restaurants.
After lunch and some shopping in San Marcos, we drove southeast to Gonzales where the Texas Revolution began when the Mexican authorities demanded the return of a cannon loaned to the people of Gonzales who replied “Come and take it!” First we went to the Chamber of Commerce where we had our passport stamped to show that we had made this stop on the independence trail. Then we toured the Old Jail Museum which is in the same building as the Chamber of Commerce and which still has a working gallows. From the jail we drove a few blocks to the Gonzales Memorial Museum. We were a little disappointed that the famous cannon, which is normally housed in the Memorial Museum, was out on tour for the independence celebration, but there were many other things to see at the museum and we enjoyed our tour. One of the other attractions of Gonzales is a Pioneer Village, but we had seen that on a previous trip so we elected to pass on it this time and do a little shopping before we headed back home. It was dinner time by the time we made it back to our neck of the woods so we stopped and ate at a restaurant near home.
Even with the high price of gas these days, this was a relatively low cost adventure. We only used half a tank of gas. Lunch for the two of us was only $14 and we could have gotten away with a cheap dinner as well if we had used a BOGO coupon, but we decided to splurge a bit on dinner.
While I know that the “Passport to Texas History” is a one-time Texas thing, it occurred to me that anyone could make up his own “passport to history” for his own state or country. All it would take is a little searching on the Internet to find some historically significant sites in the area you would like to visit. If you want to keep the cost down you can use any mapping site to make sure that you can get to all of the historical sites and back home again on one tank of gas with no nights on the road. Then you can learn something about the history of your area and have some adventures too. Who knows, you just might create your own Adventure Book.
To mark this seminal occurrence the state has scheduled several celebratory events at sites that are significant in the Texas war of independence. In order to encourage folks to visit these historic sites the state has issued a “Passport to Texas History”. This is a little booklet that tells a bit about each of the seven sites and also tells you what you should see while you're there. One of the sites that is familiar to most people is the Alamo in San Antonio. Other important sites are less well known. For example, while lots of people know the story of the Alamo, probably fewer of them have even heard of the San Felipe de Austin state historic site in East Texas where Stephen F. Austin established his original colony. When you visit a site on the list you get your passport stamped to show that you've been there. If you collect all of the stamps you get a souvenir of the 175th anniversary. So visiting all of the sites listed in the passport will enable Ellie and me to learn more about Texas history and have some adventures while we're at it.
We made our first stop on the Texas independence trail in February when we went to Washington on the Brazos, where the Texas declaration of independence was signed. That's where we picked up our passport. We spent the day touring the site, which is a Texas state park, watching reenactors and talking with the folks at the living history farm on the site. This past weekend we decided to visit Gonzales, where the revolution started.
We began our trip by driving to San Marcos for lunch at the Charles Cock House Museum Cottage Kitchen. Every Friday a different volunteer group puts on a lunch at the Cottage Kitchen for seven dollars per person. That usually includes an entree and a couple of sides as well as a drink and dessert. It's not a BOGO, but it's a pretty good deal and San Marcos is a great little college town with neat shops and restaurants.
After lunch and some shopping in San Marcos, we drove southeast to Gonzales where the Texas Revolution began when the Mexican authorities demanded the return of a cannon loaned to the people of Gonzales who replied “Come and take it!” First we went to the Chamber of Commerce where we had our passport stamped to show that we had made this stop on the independence trail. Then we toured the Old Jail Museum which is in the same building as the Chamber of Commerce and which still has a working gallows. From the jail we drove a few blocks to the Gonzales Memorial Museum. We were a little disappointed that the famous cannon, which is normally housed in the Memorial Museum, was out on tour for the independence celebration, but there were many other things to see at the museum and we enjoyed our tour. One of the other attractions of Gonzales is a Pioneer Village, but we had seen that on a previous trip so we elected to pass on it this time and do a little shopping before we headed back home. It was dinner time by the time we made it back to our neck of the woods so we stopped and ate at a restaurant near home.
Even with the high price of gas these days, this was a relatively low cost adventure. We only used half a tank of gas. Lunch for the two of us was only $14 and we could have gotten away with a cheap dinner as well if we had used a BOGO coupon, but we decided to splurge a bit on dinner.
While I know that the “Passport to Texas History” is a one-time Texas thing, it occurred to me that anyone could make up his own “passport to history” for his own state or country. All it would take is a little searching on the Internet to find some historically significant sites in the area you would like to visit. If you want to keep the cost down you can use any mapping site to make sure that you can get to all of the historical sites and back home again on one tank of gas with no nights on the road. Then you can learn something about the history of your area and have some adventures too. Who knows, you just might create your own Adventure Book.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
If Sunday You're Free...
I think it was on an old Tom Lehrer album that I heard a little ditty called Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. That song has been popping into my head like a separate personality whenever I have a quiet moment lately. Except I've been thinking about poisoning grackles instead of pigeons, and in our backyard instead of the park.
Now, normally I'm not a violent person. Cranky, yes; sarcastic, sometimes; obnoxious, frequently and inadvertently; but not violent... normally. But these are not normal times.
Here's the deal:
Like a lot of old folks my wife and I like to feed the birds. Its kind of a harmless old guy thing to do and it has lots of advantages. We get to watch colorful little critters gliding gracefully by; sort of like a tropical fish tank without the need to clean fish poop out of a filter. We get to see our feathered friends raise their families. The mamas and papas sing to each other and their little ones (or did they break up a few years ago? I dunno. My memory isn't what it used to be.) and feed them bugs and caterpillars and stuff that would otherwise be eating our garden. Plus they make a lot of noise early in the morning that annoys the neighbors that keep us up all night drinking and hollering in their hot tub. And when the ligustrum berries are ripe the birds eat 'em and then crap purple junk all over that hot tub, and the noisy neighbors' cars. Which is sort of like karma in our minds, so it's kind of a cosmic experience to feed the birds.
Of course there are a couple of down sides. That purple stuff ends up on our cars too, but that's not much of a problem because we don't usually wash them anyway so you can hardly see it. Also the money we spend on seed kind of cuts into our fixed income but we're willing to live with that. Up until now the biggest problem that we've had to contend with is so-called white-winged doves. They are as big as pigeons and there are usually 15 or 20 of them in a flock. So when they hit the feeders the seed goes pretty fast. The birds that we really like to watch, like the blue jays, cardinals and finches, have learned to deal with the white-winged doves, though, so we still get to watch the pretty birds and they get enough to eat that they keep coming back to the feeders every day.
All of this changed a couple of weeks ago. Early one morning the sky grew suddenly dark and, when we looked up to see what was going on, we felt like Tippi Hedron in that Hitchcock movie. A flock of, oh... maybe a million, or at least fifty, grackles circled overhead and then dropped onto the backyard like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. From the noise they made I'm pretty sure they were on some kind of airborne Harleys and they were all carrying boomboxes... and probably 9 millimeters too. They pushed the other birds' faces in the sand and made disparaging remarks. Then they all jumped naked into the birdbath and lounged around drinking Raging Bitch IPA before they cleaned out the feeders. After that they started stealing hubcaps, painting graffiti on the walls and taking the English sparrows hostage. It's been like that for the last two weeks, and I'm starting to get homicidal.
I know that when you do something seemingly altruistic (but secretly self-serving) like feeding the birds, you're supposed to treat them all the same and not hang up signs like “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” or “Only Birds Dressed in Primary Colors Need Apply”; and I've got to admit that when the sun hits them the grackles are this really cool metallic rainbow color, sort of like an oil slick; but come on! They only travel in massive flocks and they crowd out every other bird in the area. And eat them too. I saw a grackle chowing down on a nest full of baby mocking birds in the front yard last week while the parents cowered back in the tree and frantically tried to dial 911. Mocking birds! For the love of Mike! They're so fearless they chase crows away; but they're no match for the grackles.
So it hasn't been fun feeding the birds for the last two weeks. These days I find myself thinking about fricassee instead of watching the cardinals, and wondering what the consequences would be of following Tom Lehrer's suggestion.
Now, normally I'm not a violent person. Cranky, yes; sarcastic, sometimes; obnoxious, frequently and inadvertently; but not violent... normally. But these are not normal times.
Here's the deal:
Like a lot of old folks my wife and I like to feed the birds. Its kind of a harmless old guy thing to do and it has lots of advantages. We get to watch colorful little critters gliding gracefully by; sort of like a tropical fish tank without the need to clean fish poop out of a filter. We get to see our feathered friends raise their families. The mamas and papas sing to each other and their little ones (or did they break up a few years ago? I dunno. My memory isn't what it used to be.) and feed them bugs and caterpillars and stuff that would otherwise be eating our garden. Plus they make a lot of noise early in the morning that annoys the neighbors that keep us up all night drinking and hollering in their hot tub. And when the ligustrum berries are ripe the birds eat 'em and then crap purple junk all over that hot tub, and the noisy neighbors' cars. Which is sort of like karma in our minds, so it's kind of a cosmic experience to feed the birds.
Of course there are a couple of down sides. That purple stuff ends up on our cars too, but that's not much of a problem because we don't usually wash them anyway so you can hardly see it. Also the money we spend on seed kind of cuts into our fixed income but we're willing to live with that. Up until now the biggest problem that we've had to contend with is so-called white-winged doves. They are as big as pigeons and there are usually 15 or 20 of them in a flock. So when they hit the feeders the seed goes pretty fast. The birds that we really like to watch, like the blue jays, cardinals and finches, have learned to deal with the white-winged doves, though, so we still get to watch the pretty birds and they get enough to eat that they keep coming back to the feeders every day.
All of this changed a couple of weeks ago. Early one morning the sky grew suddenly dark and, when we looked up to see what was going on, we felt like Tippi Hedron in that Hitchcock movie. A flock of, oh... maybe a million, or at least fifty, grackles circled overhead and then dropped onto the backyard like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. From the noise they made I'm pretty sure they were on some kind of airborne Harleys and they were all carrying boomboxes... and probably 9 millimeters too. They pushed the other birds' faces in the sand and made disparaging remarks. Then they all jumped naked into the birdbath and lounged around drinking Raging Bitch IPA before they cleaned out the feeders. After that they started stealing hubcaps, painting graffiti on the walls and taking the English sparrows hostage. It's been like that for the last two weeks, and I'm starting to get homicidal.
I know that when you do something seemingly altruistic (but secretly self-serving) like feeding the birds, you're supposed to treat them all the same and not hang up signs like “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” or “Only Birds Dressed in Primary Colors Need Apply”; and I've got to admit that when the sun hits them the grackles are this really cool metallic rainbow color, sort of like an oil slick; but come on! They only travel in massive flocks and they crowd out every other bird in the area. And eat them too. I saw a grackle chowing down on a nest full of baby mocking birds in the front yard last week while the parents cowered back in the tree and frantically tried to dial 911. Mocking birds! For the love of Mike! They're so fearless they chase crows away; but they're no match for the grackles.
So it hasn't been fun feeding the birds for the last two weeks. These days I find myself thinking about fricassee instead of watching the cardinals, and wondering what the consequences would be of following Tom Lehrer's suggestion.
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