Yard work plans 10/21

The good news: I spent a lot of time working in the yard yesterday.  The bad news: I spent most of that time avoiding raking.  The blurriness of this picture is pretty representative of the way I feel about raking.

In the morning, the leaves were still wet from Friday's rain, so rather than try to do anything in the yard, I drove about 10 minutes to the local nursery to check it out.  I came away with one plant and a book; more on that later this week.  After some lunch, I got outside and started moving the piles of leaves that I had raked last week and the week before to my various storage areas around the property.  I soon tired of this, though, and moved to the garden to continue clearing out the weeds.  I'll have a picture post from these efforts later this week.  I still wasn't ready to start raking, so I moved to the wildflower patch by the deer trail and began to remove the thorny plants.  I'd like to eventually add more variety to the wildflower areas in the yard, and getting rid of those pesky thorny plants is the first logical step, at least to my naive mind.  I'll have a couple of pictures of clearing the thorny plants later this week, too.  Finally, I brought the laptop outside so I could play some music and move some leaves.  I got the patio cleared, and just in time for one squirrel.

Just before writing this post this morning, I noticed a squirrel surveying the patio with a nut in his/her mouth (I'll assume it was male).  He looked at a couple of crevices between the stones before settling on one.  With me staring at him the whole time, he dug into the soil and deposited the nut into his hole, with only four feet and a glass door between us.

Squirrels are decidedly less skittish when they're trying to preserve their food for the long, harsh Upstate New York winter.

This squirrel was completely focusing on getting that nut in the ground, and he paid me no mind whatsoever.

Aftet the nut was securely buried, the squirrel covered the spot with leaves and began to scamper away.  Then he paused and turned around.  He gave the spot one last look, maybe as a reminder as to where it was, or maybe to re-assure himself that the nut was safe.

For today, I'll be outside with some tunes trying to get some raking done...