And the Seeds March On

While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease. (Genesis 8:22)

It's seedtime here again with a new one for you to guess. I'm making you work hard to maybe win a couple of books, but I hope you're having fun too. This might be another not so easy one. Then again, you might guess it right off the bat. I look forward to reading your guesses.

I was right about the last picture not being easy. It might have been easy for me if I'd been on the other end of the mystery picture because I grew up with these little bushes all over our farm. My father did not like them at all. He thought they were pests and had been brought into the area, but when I looked them up online it sounded as if they were supposed to be right here in Kentucky and all over the eastern United States. We always called them buck berry bushes. Here's a buck berry link to information about them. I was completely surprised to see that you can actually buy seeds to grow these bushes and the seeds were expensive. We were always trying to find ways to get rid of the bushes, not grow them. 

Of course, my sister and I "harvested" the little berries to use

in our mud pie kitchen. Made for great "cherry" pies. And they were easy to pick. No thorns and low to the ground. The article said birds and animals eat them. I guess they do, but if so, they must not taste very good because buck berries seem to be the last to be eaten. Must not be exactly like chocolate to the wildlife. Or my dad would say there are just so many of the bushes and thus berries that I'm not noticing that the animals are eating a few of them.

Thanks, as always, for reading. If you want to know about my blog giveaway just go back a few posts to read about it or check out the details here.

Another Seed to Guess

Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth"; and it was so. (Genesis 1:11 NKJ)

Just as I thought, most all of you guessed last week's "seed." They were black walnuts. A few of you had interesting other guesses such as pears, pawpaws, hedge apples, fig, guava, and quince. But no, they were black walnuts. Here's another picture of them after they've fallen off the tree and are on the ground for the picking. The green hull comes off and inside the nut shell is black and very hard. It takes a real knock with a hammer or rock to break them. 

When I was a kid, we picked them up and put them in a low place on our rocky driveway. After the car had run over them a few times to mash off the green outer shell, we picked up the black nuts and let them dry for a while. Then Mom would break them with a hammer. She had a special nut cracking rock that I still have around here somewhere. It took patience to get the nut meat out of the shells with a nut picker, but those black walnuts were delicious in chocolate candy or divinity. Just thinking about how good that was makes me consider saving a few of the walnuts from the squirrels so I can make some Christmas candy like Mom did.

Another walnut memory was from when my kids were young. We'd go out in the fields and pick up the walnuts to sell. We'd have gunny sacks full and the kids would be counting their money before we finally got their dad to take the walnuts to the local feed store where the buyers set up machines to hull the walnuts. The kids never got as much as they dreamed they might get because the nuts weren't weighed until after the green hull was off. So even though we had picked up sacks and sacks of them, the pounds they were paid for was probably less than half that. Still, it wasn't a bad way to spend a beautiful fall day - out in the woods picking up walnuts with the kids. A little hard on the back sometimes. This year we are having a bountiful crop. My mother-in-law used to say that meant we were in for a hard winter, but industrious squirrels won't have to worry about going hungry. I watched one of them bury one of the walnuts in the yard last week to store it for later.

This week's picture is posted up top. Got a guess on them? Another one that might be extra easy for us country girl types. Remember you get an entry in the giveaway for the choice of one of my books and a grab bag book by another author every time you make a guess on one of the seed pictures. Just please let me know a way to contact you in case you are one of the two winners I'll pick on October 31. You don't have to get the guess right. Just make a guess or be like one of my Facebook friends and admit you are not a nature person and haven't the foggiest. :) That will get you entered in the drawing too. As always, thanks for reading.

"Anybody can count the number of seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed." (Robert H. Schuller)