There are no recipes in this post. This is the story of something that happened to me yesterday. I hope you’ll read it to the end.

If you follow this blog, you know Dennis and I, with some help from our kids, painted the exterior of our house this fall. It’s not completely done: there’s still some trim work and fascia and posts and beams on the porches as well as the doors to finish. We were interrupted by deer season and now have to go back at the painting before the weather turns. But I also have the fall harvest of the garden to take care of, the apples, the ripening tomatoes, the potatoes which haven’t all been dug yet, and when we get our first frost, the green tomatoes and the winter squash will have to be brought in. And I’m running low on pint jars.

When we were painting the spare room side of the house, I discovered some filthy, leaf-filled boxes under the back porch. “What’s in these?” I asked Dennis. “I don’t know,” he said. “Bottles, I think.” Bottles? Why would we have boxes of bottles, and what kind of bottles, under the back porch? I pulled one box out far enough to see what was in it, being wary of spiders and other nasty critters. Not bottles, jars. Jars! Canning jars!

Now I have to backtrack a bit. I started canning with my mother when I was a kid. I canned with her until I left home, and after I got married and started my own family, I started canning again on my own. At one point, I was canning so much, Mama gave me some of her jars. With no kids left at home, she wasn’t canning as much as she once had. But when in the 90s I started traveling over 150 miles a day, two and three times a week, to classes at the University of Nevada, Reno, I stopped canning. I just couldn’t keep up with the garden, the kids, the classes, the commute, and the canning. Something had to give. It was the garden and the canning. For quite a few years, all I grew in my garden was herbs and a few tomatoes for eating fresh. Even after I finished my Master’s and started teaching, I didn’t do any canning. I was just too busy. All my jars were boxed up and stashed, I thought, in the shed.

During that period, when my kids were teenagers, we lost my beloved mother.  The picture below, taken when she was in her fifties, younger than I am now, is how I remember my mama.

She’d been ill with dementia for some years before she died, and finally, she withered away. It was a very difficult time for all of us. My mama was a wonderful, loving presence in our lives, and losing her, slowly at first, then finally, was very painful. I think her loss was one thing that drew me back, gradually, to canning. Canning was a way of feeling closer to her. I started making jelly again, and pickles, and one thing led to another, until I was back in full swing after I retired a few years ago.

During my non-canning period, I remember my father asking me if I had any jars I wasn’t using. I said I did, and he could have them all, as at that time, I didn’t foresee canning in my future. He was canning a lot of salmon at that time and wanted wide-mouthed pints. I went into the old yellow shed and looked around. I found a few boxes of jars, some pints and quarts, but not nearly as many as I thought I should have. I looked and looked, enlisted Dennis’s help, and we couldn’t find any more jars. I gave Dad what I had and thought, well, I just didn’t have as many jars as I thought I had.

When I began to can again a few years ago, I had to start over collecting jars, buying them at Walmart and WinCo, looking for them at garage sales and thrift stores. I looked again in the sheds for the jars I thought I’d had years before. They weren’t there. I asked Dennis again if he’d seen them anywhere. No, he said. Well, that was that. I had to buy jars. Every year, I would run out of jars in August and have to buy more for the fall harvest. Finally, this year, a year in which a lot of travel meant I wouldn’t be doing nearly as much canning as I normally do, I didn’t run completely out of jars. But I didn’t have as many jars for the upcoming fall projects as I needed. I needed more pints for apple butter and applesauce, and more quarts for apple pie filling and tomatoes. (I have more than enough half-pint jelly jars, enough to set up shop!)

So yesterday, as I was putting cherry tomatoes in the dehydrator (more about this in another post) and thinking about the boxes of apples I still have to process, I thought I’d better wait on the apples and get those jars out from under the back porch. They were going to need a lot of cleaning before they’d be usable. But I needed jars and jars I had, dirty though they were.

Gloves on, cringing at spiders scuttling off into every direction, I pulled five boxes of jars out from under the steps. Yes, there was a milk crate with some Pepsi bottles in it. Dennis was partly right. I have no idea where those came from or why they were saved, because I don’t think they’re old enough to be worth anything, but I’ll have to check and see.

The jars were stacked several layers deep in old beer boxes and topped with layers of oak leaves and spider webs and other icky things.

I dragged each box out onto the lawn and over to a dry patch that always needs a little extra water. The hose was handy there, too. I flooded those boxes, hoping to drown all the black widows before I had to reach in and take out the jars. Ick. One by one, I pulled out the jars, filled them with water, and hosed down the outsides. They were filthy with decades of dirt. Several of them contained little dried tree frog carcasses which rehydrated into shades of their former selves after soaking in water. (Too bad my grandson, Bryce, wasn’t with me. He’d have loved that.) Big black beetles were in the jars too, and spiders, of course, dead ones with their legs all curled up around their bellies. Any live ones were long gone at this point.

After I got all the jars out of the boxes, I rinsed them well with the hose, then tipped them over to drain.

Then I got a big plastic bag from the house, and filled it with a dozen jars at time to carry back to the sink. It took many trips and several sinkfuls of hot, soapy water before I had the dishwasher full of jars. After another bath in the dishwasher, turned to the hottest setting, the jars were clean. I ran two dishwasher loads of jars.

These, surely, were the jars I’d searched for before. Why Dennis put them under the back porch and forgot about them is a mystery a long-married lady like me declines to probe. I wasn’t sure at first whether these were jars I’d bought myself years before or jars that Mama had given me, but they were jars. And I could feel Mama smiling at my shoulder.

All day, since my devotion time that morning, I’d felt Mama close to me. Some verses I’d read in my Bible that morning brought her vividly to mind. They were verses about suffering, and they’d made me think of what my son had said to my daughter not long ago, when they were talking about why their beloved grandmother had died not knowing who she was, or who we were. Joel said to Amy, “Maybe the Lord saved her from a worse death. She didn’t die in pain or shock or fear. She just slipped away.”

Everyone knows there are stages to grief. We know that it can take years to move from one stage to the next, and each of us has to move through these stages at his or her own pace, in our own time. Yesterday morning, I finally fully accepted the manner of Mama’s death. I accepted what had happened to Mama, and the Lord’s wisdom in it. When I did that, I stopped fearing that kind of death for myself. That fear has dogged me for over twenty years. And Mama was there, at my shoulder, smiling. She stayed there all day as I halved cherry tomatoes and cleaned those dirty jars. And she and her Lord reached out and touched me, tangibly.

The final tally on the jars was this: 30 wide-mouth quarts, 22 regular mouth quarts, 7 special quarts (none antique but some vintage, I believe), 9 half-pint jelly jars, 11 wide-mouth pints, 3 regular mouth pints, and several commercial jars, pickle and mayonnaise jars, which Mama used for homemade pickles and applesauce and jelly. In today’s money, that’s like sticking your hand into the pocket of your winter coat and pulling out a hundred dollar bill. But it was more than that, for among those assorted jars was one very special jar.

In one of the boxes, I found a Smuckers’ jelly jar, strawberry, with the label still intact, and on the lid was printed “Dorothy.” That was my mother’s name. It means, in either Latin or Greek, Gift of God. Her name was also marked on the label.

One of my mother’s friends had set aside and given a jar of something homemade for her, marked with her name. It was a sign and symbol of how much she was loved, and how much she loved. And it was like my mother to save that jar, for she’d find a use for it. She’d fill it with something and give it back, or give it away to someone else. Because that’s who she was. She gave it to me because she taught me to use what others would throw away.

Her life was a testament to her faith. She has never stopped giving or loving because that is her gift. Dorothy, Gift of God. I thank God for the gift of you, Mama, and for all that you taught me and gave me. You are still doing both. And I have your jar to remind me, if ever I’m tempted to forget, just what sort of life you lived, and what your life meant. Your jar is a reminder that a life lived with faith and love keeps giving, even after death in this world. That jar with your name on it will never be empty.

Because of a family emergency, I have been called away from home and garden and greenhouse.  Thanks to my daughter-in-law and friends, everything will be cared for.  I don’t know how long I’ll be away, but please don’t forget about Garden, Forest, Field.   I’ll be back.

Every gardener has a garden style.  Some people like neat and orderly; others want it wild and natural.  I tend to fall into the latter category.  I like a well-filled garden.  I don’t want to see empty spaces of soil between rows.  I don’t much like rows, although row-planting works best for some plants, like beans and peas.  I like to plant ground crops in patches, a patch of potatoes bordered by a patch of pumpkins, for instance.  I don’t care if the pumpkins overrun the potatoes.  I’ll harvest them about the same time, so I don’t have to get into either patch to pick anything while the plants are actively growing.  I usually mulch these crops too, so I don’t have to do much, if any, weeding.

This year, I have volunteer broccoli growing between my young blueberry bushes.  The blueberries aren’t very big, and only two of them bore fruit this year.  I saw that wasted space and had to put something in it.  I didn’t want the broccoli to stay where it was (yes, that’s a control issue, but I learned my lesson about letting broccoli grow in the same space as tomatoes), so I transplanted it out of the tomato box bed.  I grow my tomatoes and peppers in raised box beds, and I tuck things like basil, garlic, shallots, spinach, and lettuce (and once, some broccoli) in the spaces between the larger plants or around the edges of the raised beds.  This is what it looked like in the spring.

I think it looks pretty, all the different textures and colors of plants growing together, and I get the benefits of companion planting.  I think you could say I’m not a big control freak when it comes to the garden.  I don’t worry about a weed, or two, or even a dozen, although I’ll pull them if I can get to them.  I don’t care about straight lines or tidy corners.  I don’t really like monoculture.  And as my back has grown ever more crooked and painful in recent years, I’ve had to accept that I can’t keep my garden looking like my parents’ garden used to look, even if I wanted to.  My garden is a reflection of me:  curved, flawed, but productive.

In fact, I think you could say that my garden is teaching me how to let go a little more each day.  My garden reminds me that I am not in control of everything, nor do I need to be.  The garden is capable of ruling itself.  I plant seeds, I water, I feed my soil and the worms, I cultivate when I have to and mulch everywhere I can, but the garden essentially takes care of itself.

And there are always surprises, like the hybrid squash that popped up in the middle of the volunteer potatoes.  Looks like we missed some of both when we harvested last year.  I hadn’t planned to grow anything this year in that strip along the blackberries and raspberries because I’m trying to keep a dry border between the berries and the rest of the garden to prevent root spread.   The squash will be edible; whether or not it’s good will be another thing.  But my mama taught me not to turn my nose up at a gift.  I’ll figure out something to do with it, because that’s what I do.

I dug some of those potatoes for 4^th of July potato salad, and I’ll probably harvest about 40 lbs. of potatoes from the volunteers alone.  (My secret?  Make sure your husband misses a whole row of potatoes when he’s digging them up in the fall.  Works every time.)  A pair of tomato seedlings appeared in the center of the garden, in that patch I’m trying to dry out to get rid of the raspberries that were choking out everything else.  (Okay, so I do have a few control issues left!)  I transplanted them, but I haven’t been able to get to them to pick (they’re cherries) because the squash has so outgrown its area.  That’s okay, too.  The birds will get the tomatoes, or they’ll drop the fruit, and I’ll have more volunteers next year.  I’m good with it, either way.

Over behind the mini-tomato box, there are some volunteer carrots.  I had carrots growing nearby two years ago.  We missed one when we dug the last of them from under the snow that year.  Last year, that root bloomed and set seeds, and this spring, they sprouted here and there. I left them, and not long ago, my carrot-loving grandson, Bryce, got to pull them up for a treat.

And the snow peas that sprouted from the few that got away last year—well, we got several pickings from those plants, along with a few broccoli florets from those volunteers I transplanted between the blueberries.

These are the 4th of July new potatoes, red, russet, and Yukon Gold, alongside the snow peas and broccoli from volunteer plants.

These are the gifts my garden gives me, plants I did not earn with labor, intent, or standard practice.   Do these unexpected rewards alter my planting plan for the year?  Certainly.  But I’m willing to concede the ground to the garden, to accept the gifts, to enjoy the surprises the garden offers.  It’s good to let go of the need to control everything, because the truth is, a gardener is always at the mercy of forces, like weather, that he or she cannot control.  And isn’t this also true of life in general?  The garden teaches me that humility is a far greater virtue than efficiency.  Let the volunteers grow where they may.

A friend of mine has a more polite name for what I do.  She calls it “gleaning.”  But the simple truth is, I am a scavenger.  I scavenge all kinds of things.  It’s a habit of mind, of process.  I grew up this way.  Often, it’s food I’m scavenging, but not always.

Last spring, Dennis and I were returning from town and had to stop at the light.  He pointed to the truck ahead of us and said, “Looks like somebody tore down an old fence and is taking the wood to the dump.”  I took a good look and got all excited.

“I can use that stuff,” I said.  I want to build a retaining wall in the front yard, and when I saw those old cedar posts, I thought they would be perfect.  “I wonder if he’d take it to our house instead of the dump.”

Dennis thought I was crazy.  But I said it wouldn’t hurt to ask the man.  If he gave it to us, he wouldn’t have to pay the dump fees.  So we passed him on the hill, then turned into the dump and waited for him.  He was an older man, and he looked wary when I motioned him over to the side of the road at the dump entrance, but he rolled his window down.  I made my pitch, and he said he was going to use his free dump day to get rid of the wood.  “Oh,” I said, utterly crestfallen.

“But if you’ll use it, I’d rather give it to you,” he added.  So he followed us home, and he and Dennis unloaded the wood out by the greenhouse.  We introduced ourselves, and I offered him gas money for going the extra ten miles out of his way, but he wouldn’t take it.  He wanted to look at the greenhouse, so I offered him some of my beautiful romaine that was growing inside.  And that’s the story of how I got a load of cedar posts for a bag of lettuce.

When I was a child, my mother and father struggled to make ends meet.  It was a challenge to put food on the table for five people (and often we had uninvited guests, who were always made welcome), especially when there was no work for a logger in the rainy season.  My father always put in a big garden, and my mother learned to can and freeze the produce because it was a way to make sure there’d be some food in the lean winters.  Mama also scavenged fruit from abandoned orchards or backyard trees.  She made applesauce, apple butter, and pear butter from fruit that nobody else wanted, and gallons of blackberry jelly.  Once, someone gave her a pig’s head, and she made hogshead cheese from it.  The thing scared me half to death when I came home and found it sitting on top of the washing machine in the laundry room.  I remember being horrified by the very idea of making anything out of a head.  Now, it makes me proud that she was so resourceful.  As the youngest of ten children, she didn’t grow up learning how to cook or preserve or even to garden.  She learned it all after she was married at the “old” age of 31.  She learned the arts of scavenging, gardening, and preserving because she had to, because that was how she could provide for her family.

I don’t have to scavenge to put food on the table for my family, but I’m always on the lookout for things that nobody else wants, things I can put to use.  I hate waste.  I hate to see fruit falling off the trees and rotting on the ground because nobody wants to pick it and deal with it.  It frustrates me to hear on the news that millions of people are hungry when I see food all around me that no one is gathering.  Why aren’t hungry people out there picking this stuff, like my mama did?  Where’s the gumption? I can hear Mama saying.  I wonder too.

A few weeks ago, Dennis and I, and our son and his two children, went to the Northern California coast, where I grew up, to fish.  While we were there, we picked blackberries, which were just ripening.  The grandchildren were delighted to pick all the berries they could reach.  Kaedynce (8) put hers in a bag for blackberry pancakes the next day, but Bryce (6), predictably, ate every single one he picked.  Growing in the middle of one blackberry patch was an apple tree festooned with big, beautiful, green apples with blushing red cheeks.  They looked like Gravensteins to me, my favorite pie apple.  I have a Grav at home, but these apples were far ahead of those on my little tree.  So in addition to the berries, we took home a couple dozen apples.  If I lived there, I’d go back in September and pick as many apples as I could reach.  Such flavor!

Two weeks ago, I made the 14 mile trip to town to pick fruit.  There’s an apricot tree in a sidewalk square near the old Superior Court building, now occupied by another agency.  I stopped by on Saturday and knocked on the door, just to make sure nobody would mind if picked, but I wasn’t really concerned that anyone would.  It’s been a good fruit summer in the valley, and all the apricot trees have borne heavily.  Apricots are lying on sidewalks all over town, and people are complaining about the mess.  I got my ladder out of my car, set it up on the sidewalk, and picked a bag of apricots, but I couldn’t reach the really good ones.  So the next week, Dennis and I went back to town, to the old court building and the old jail, where there is also an apricot tree.  He set the ladder up, and we picked about 20 pounds of apricots, which I turned into 17 pints of jam.

I also spotted an apricot tree and apple tree, both loaded with fruit, on a strip of mowed grass that fronts the river.  There are no houses or fencing along that piece, but it was obvious that someone was taking care of the land.  I stopped at the neighboring house, introduced myself, and asked the resident, an older gentleman, if he knew who owned that strip of land.  He gave me the owner’s name but said he didn’t know if the owner would mind if I picked fruit from his apricot tree.  “But I have some plums,” the man said, “if you’d like to pick them.  I hate to see them go to waste.”

He led me to the tree in his side yard.  We chatted while I picked, and I learned that his name was Bob, and he had been the vice-principal at the high school, but had retired before my children attended there.  He and his wife had planted the plum tree many years ago, a 30 ft. tall Santa Rosa plum that hung heavy with fruit.  It was a hot day, and my shirt was damp with sweat when I finished.

I picked a bag of plums, thanked Bob, and said I would bring him back a jar of jam.  He quite clearly wasn’t sure I really would, so it was fun to surprise him the following week with jam from his plums as well as blackberry jelly from my garden.  He allowed me to pick more plums, and two days later, I was back with a jar of Chinese plum sauce as thanks for his generosity.

I’m always scavenging something, or gleaning, if you prefer.  My gains are more than material.  I make connections with like-minded people who aren’t happy with the culture of the disposable that permeates our technology-driven society.  Often these are people a generation older than myself, folks who remember hard times and what had to be done to get through them.  They hold a wisdom we’d do well to ponder and emulate.

This winter, when we’re eating plum and apricot jam on homemade bread and looking out at the new retaining wall, I’ll tell my grandkids these stories and hope that they absorb the lesson.  Scavengers, hold your heads high.  Some sweetness is only born of sweat.

Every gardener has his or her favorite tools.  The hand trowel that fits just so in the palm of your hand, that old raking fork you modified to get into the tight places between plants.  I have mine, too.  As a disabled gardener, I’m learning to make things a little easier for myself.  Maybe a look at my favorite tools might help you garden a little easier too.  Here’s a photo of my favorite tools.

First, the chair.  This old thing was sitting in the garden space when we bought the property nearly thirty years ago.  It’s made of a heavy duty wire which was once coated with a white plastic-like substance.  The plastic is nearly all gone now.  It gets a little more rusty-looking every year, but it’s still holding together.  I like it because it’s light, and I can move it easily to different areas of the garden while I’m pruning, weeding, or hula-hoeing.  I used it this morning to pick the peas.  Sitting sure beats stooping when you have a bad back.  The wide, wire mesh chair doesn’t hold water, so there’s always a dry seat in the garden, and I can move it into the shade for a rest when I get too hot out there.  I could clean it up, take a wire brush to it and give it a new coat of paint.  But then I’d have to worry about it getting rusty again, exposed to the weather.  I leave it alone.  It sits out all year round.  It’s one thing I don’t have to put away for winter.

The long-handled tool in the photo is called a sliding hoe, or as I learned to call it, a hula hoe.   I was first introduced to this tool nearly forty years ago, when I worked on the grounds at the Trees of Mystery in Northern California.  I’ve used one ever since.  Now that my back doesn’t like bending at all, I sit on that rusty old chair and hula hoe wherever I don’t have mulch.  It’s much easier on my back, and it takes much less effort to push the hula hoe, even in dry, hard soil or wet, heavy soil, than it takes to hack and pull with a regular hoe.

Here’s how the hula hoe works.  The blade slides along just an inch or two under the surface of the soil, depending on how much force you use, and it cuts the roots of weeds without turning over much of the soil.  This way, the weeds are eliminated without exposing more weed seeds to light, the way a tiller does.  It doesn’t work for big weeds that will sprout back out from large roots left in the ground, like dandelions.  But if you get after that patch of newly-spouted dandelions with a hula-hoe, you won’t have to worry about them getting so big they have to be dug out with a spade.

That brings me to the third of my favorite tools, my little spade.  I bought this one years ago at a yard sale for $4.   I have to be careful about digging.  I leave any major shovel work to my husband, God bless him, but for light jobs, this little spade is perfect for me.  I can spade up a dandelion or a clump of new potatoes, or dig a hole for planting without getting so much dirt on the blade that it becomes difficult to lift.  With this little spade, I can actually dig while seated on my rusty old chair.

The fourth tool is my garden stool.  I bought the stool a few years ago from a seed catalog.  I love it.  It gets me low to the ground to minimize bending, and it has a padded seat cover with those handy carrying pouches for my hand tools and gloves.  There’s a height adjustment, so it can be set for personal preference.  I use it for weeding and thinning and for picking the bush beans and pickling cucumbers.  It rocks back and forth, and it swivels on its base, so I can cover a lot of area without having to move it much.  I have found it a bit difficult to get up when I’ve been sitting on it for a while, but now, two years after the last hip surgery, my legs are finally getting strong enough to hoist me up from what is basically a squat.

We all know the saying about choosing the right tool for the job.  You also have to choose the right tool for your body.  My favorite tools make gardening much easier on my back and other compromised body parts.  One or more of them might make things easier for you, too.

Sometimes I’m asked why I spend so much time gardening, and making preserves, and canning and freezing my garden produce.  Why bother with a garden at all?  I have chronic pain issues from several health conditions.  Wouldn’t it make more sense just to buy from the store?

Maybe it would.  The more I do, the more I hurt.  There’s a fine line between keeping my body as active as possible and putting my body through more stress than it can handle.  I cross that line on a regular basis.  And then I pay for every infraction.  So why do I do it?

One of the reasons I make preserves is that it seems to bring me closer to my mother, who passed away some 15 years ago.  She learned to can out of necessity.  My father was a logger who only worked seasonally.  Mama canned and froze the garden produce, and she also took advantage of the bounty around her.  She found abandoned apple orchards and picked apples for applesauce and apple butter.  She made blackberry jelly every summer, after we picked gallons of berries.  I remember the competitions between my siblings and me–who could pick the most berries by the end of the allotted time.  I remember the laughter when my father out-picked all of us.  I remember his stories about picking cotton as a kid.

When I use Mama’s “cone colander” to juice my berries, I remember all the times she set it up on the yellow and chrome kitchen table.  She let my sister and me take our turns when we were little, and when we got older, it was our job.  I remember the scent of warm blackberry juice filling the house on the days when she made jelly and put it up in old peanut butter jars.  I remember the taste of blackberry jelly on my peanut butter sandwich.  I remember my mama, her spunkiness, her gentleness, her strength, her wisdom, her love.   She taught me to can, gave me both my water bath canner and my pressure canner when I married, but she taught me so much more.  It’s good to be reminded of those lessons.

Both of my grandmothers used water bath canners, and I’m sure their mothers made preserves in open kettles.  When I make jam or piccalilli or pickles, I know that I’m doing something my pioneer foremothers did.  I like knowing I have their “know-how.”  I feel proud when I see those multi-colored jars on my shelves.  I feel self-sufficient, knowing I can go out to the pantry whenever I want to and choose between six different jams or jellies, or a jar of beet pickles, or a jar of dilly beans, or a jar of venison stock.  And it all came from the garden, the forest, or the field, and through my hands.  That makes me feel accomplished in a very practical way.

I like having home-canned goodies to give away.  When I give a jar of jam or relish, I’m giving a part of my heart and soul to people I care about.  Part of my annual Christmas gifts to my children are boxes of the good things they grew up eating.  Last year, everybody went nuts over the salsa.  My sister has her favorites, piccalilli and tomato and raisin chutney.  I also give jarred gifts to friends for birthdays, and as thank-you or hostess gifts.  Recently, as a bridal shower gift to the dear friend who gave me my favorite canning book, Canning For a New Generation, by Liana Krissoff, I offered a box of assorted preserves, one of which was Cabernet Sauvignon jelly, a recipe from the book.

After a long day of canning, does my back hurt?  Yes.  And my hands, and my feet, and my neck, and sometimes my shoulders too.  But my heart feels good.  My soul has been fed.  All kinds of sweet memories reawaken.  That’s why I bother.  It turns out, all things weighed and measured, it’s really no bother at all.

I had planned a different post for today, but there’s been too much fun happening around the garden this week.  So today, it’s a creature feature.  By the way, if you click on the photos, they enlarge.  You’ll probably want to do that with the three at the end.

First, all week I’ve been trying to get pictures of a male Rufous hummingbird who has been hanging around the feeder and ferociously driving off every other bird except one.  But he’s been too quick for me.  By the time I’d get the camera on and in position, he was either chasing another bird or camouflaged behind some leaves up in the oak tree, lying in ambush.  He’s the most beautiful little creature.  In the bright sun, his back is a glowing copper color, and his throat a dark scarlet highlighted by his white breast.  He’s gorgeous, and he knows it.  The only other hummer he’ll allow to feed is a drab little thing I’m thinking must be a Rufous female.  He let her take long turns at the feeder.  I watched him defend the feeder from all other comers for three days.  The other pair, perhaps Allen’s (they are so hard to identify when they are swooping around), could only sneak in for short sips when Rufous was off on some other brief business.  But everything changed on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Rufous male didn’t show up.  I sat on the deck all day, armed with the camera, and he never came.  However, a bird who looked like his dull, little friend came to guard the feeder.  She was almost as aggressive as the male, and she sat in the tree all day, twittering to herself, scratching, and chasing off other birds.  She sat so long in the same place, I was able to get a couple of short videos of her and a few pictures.  (I can’t upload the videos here, but you can see them on Facebook later.)  Judging by her aggressive behavior, I think she is a Rufous female, but I am not sure.  If anyone can make a positive I.D., I would love to know.

Other hummers flew in briefly on Thursday and Friday to feed.  The little female chased off as many as she could, including a hummingbird twice her size, perhaps a Broad-tailed.  I didn’t get a picture of the big hummer, but I did get a picture of her on the feeder and in the tree afterward.

This state of affairs lasted until Friday evening, when a Rufous male showed up.  The same one?  I have no idea.  I have read that these birds are highly migratory, making a big circle from Mexico to British Columbia every year.  They may only spend a few days in one area before moving on.  While they are around, they consider the feeder theirs.  The Rufous male was in and out all day on Saturday, but I think he may have been guarding another feeder in the neighborhood.  He didn’t really spend much time at ours.  And the little female?  She seemed to take the Rufous male’s arrival as a signal to depart.

Years ago, when my kids were little, I put out a feeder every summer (we don’t get hummers here until June at the earliest), and we always had some traffic.  But after the kids got bigger, and everyone got busier, I stopped putting out feeders.  I knew my neighbor put out several feeders every year, and I had lots of dianthus and petunias, which the hummingbirds loved, so we still saw them for some years.  And then, for a period of about seven years, they visited very intermittently.  I believe they were feeding on manzanita blossoms higher in the mountains, and our yard was only a brief rest stop for them.  Starting about ten years ago, our area was devastated by wild fires every summer or every other summer.  I think a lot of the hummingbird feeding ground was destroyed, particularly in 2008, and that is why we saw so few of them for so long.  (About this time, we also started seeing more bears lower down on the mountain.  Much of their habitat was destroyed too.)  For three or four years, I didn’t see any hummingbirds in the summer.  Vegetation is now growing back in those burned areas, and we’re seeing an increase in hummingbirds.  It’s good to have them back again.  They always make me smile.

But hummingbirds aren’t the only interesting creatures visiting the garden this week.  I was out tickling tomato blossoms one day, and I heard a strange sound.  It was a very quiet flapping/humming noise.  I turned around and looked at the asparagus bed behind me.  I have some clary sage growing there as well, and at first, I thought a hummingbird had discovered the blossoms.  But it wasn’t a hummingbird.  It was a hummingbird moth.

I have seen these hummingbird moths before.  I got a short video of it (it’s on Facebook). I watched the moth for some time before it flew away, and I haven’t seen it since.  It was a brief visit, but I’m sure glad it stopped by.  There’s a good still photo of one at http://www.birds-n-garden.com/hummingbird_moths.html.

That same day, I saw another insect I have never seen before. I have no idea what this thing is.  If you do, please tell me!  It flew up from the potato patch when the sprinkler came on and landed on a green tomato.  The hummingbird moth had just flown off, so I had the camera in my hand.  It looks vicious.  Is that a butterfly in its jaws?

The other visitor to the yard was a young doe.  She bedded down in the shade right beside the gate.  After she’d been resting for a bit, and I’d been snapping pictures of her, I learned why she chose that spot.  It was because she could stand up on her back legs and grab a mouthful of leaves from the maple tree.  Then she could lie right down in the shade and chew them.  I didn’t get a picture of her up on her back legs.  I’m afraid I yelled, “Hey, don’t eat my tree!” and she took off.  A photographer, a real photographer, would have let her eat the tree for the sake of the picture.  But, gardener that I am, I spoiled the shot.  That says volumes about my priorities.

Finally, some photos I have to share because the subjects are just so darn cute.

The twins weren’t actually on our property, although I’m sure we’ll be seeing them up here soon.  They were on the side of the road down the street.  They weren’t at all worried about us or our truck.  They obligingly stood very quietly and let me take their pictures.  No matter how many times I see baby deer, they still make me say “Aww!”  And be glad for my six-foot wire fence.