I’m an avid feeder of animals. I just can’t help myself. Aside from the Smallest Smallholding’s resident cats and hens, I also feed hedgehogs (we occasionally release hedgehogs for Bedfordshire Wildlife Rescue too) and wild birds. As different wild birds prefer to eat different foods in different ways - for instance, goldfinches like to eat niger seed from hanging tables or feeders, and blackbirds like to eat fats, berries and seeds from the ground feeders - I have a variety of feeders and feeding stations at the Smallest Smallholding. However, keeping hens means I have to be careful now and try and keep everything clean, so I’ve tried to reduce the amount of sunflower seed that gets scattered directly on the ground.

However, this year, a few sunflower seeds made their way into a small vacant bed I half-dug, and low and behold some beautiful and striking sunflowers started growing there. I couldn’t pull them out, they seemed so happy there, and aside from the occasional water from me, they didn’t require any feeding or help. So I left them there, like a bristling collection of happy little accidents, waving and bobbing around in the breeze, bringing some much-needed colour into a current sea of green.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 3:40 pm and is filed under flowers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.