Seed Guessing Contest Winners

                           

I don't have the seeds for this old tree I spotted out in Monterey Bay. It was such an ancient tree that the garden keepers have built a frame to support its branches. That's loving a tree. Nobody was around for me to ask what the tree was, but if some of you out there know, I'd love for you to share that with us. 

I've had great fun with the Seed Guessing Game. Thank you all for doing the guessing. A few of you were right with this last picture but some of you weren't. The popular guess was Catalpa. That was wrong. Catalpa pods are much longer and greener as best I remember from the tree that was in my aunt's backyard when I was a kid. I remember loving the tree and its blooms and thinking it was a great place to lie in the grass and daydream until...you guessed it...until those worms showed up. I never cared much for worms when I was a kid. Maybe that's why I never decided fishing was fun. :) 

Another guess, and a very good one, was black locust tree pods. But that too was not right. I grew up in a yard where black locust trees were our only shade. The trees grow fast, but they don't make that great a shade. They do make good firewood if seasoned. Also, old timers claim they draw lightning. Not sure if that's true, but our locust trees did get hit by lightning a few times. Then, they have those little thorns on their twigs that fall off on the ground and make running barefoot very unpleasant. However, we did use those bean pods on the trees in our mud pie kitchen. Definitely a good addition to our "pantry" right there along with the buck berry bush seeds from a few posts ago. Nothing we could really eat, but great pretend food.

There were other guesses too. And then, some of you guessed the exact right tree - the redbud tree. This year the seeds on those are abundant. Not sure if anything eats them or not, but if they do, they'll have some winter food. 

Thank you all for playing my guessing game. Okay, have I let the suspense build long enough? 

It's time to announce the winners!! Karen G. and Linda Mc, you are my winners. I've sent you e-mails with the choices of books. If I don't hear from the winners in the next week, I'll pick new winners, but I expect to hear from them soon. 

Now I'll have to come up with a new game. Or at least a giveaway. What can I give away between Thanksgiving and December???

As always, thank you so much for reading!

Some Seeds are Trouble

Have you had fun guessing the seeds? This is the last one. I'll be drawing for the winners this weekend. Two winners or who knows? Maybe three. And remember you don't have to have the right guess to enter. Just say you don't know the way Gail and Annette did on Sunday's post. But some of you did guess my Sunday picture or at least came very close. The picture is of a Chinese chestnut from a tree in our yard. 

Somebody gave my husband the seed years ago and he decided to see if it would grow. It did. But I have to tell you it is NOT my favorite tree. It was okay for several years, but then it bloomed. Not good. Very not good! At the time we didn't have air conditioning and depended on an attic fan to cool out the house at night. Chinese chestnut blooms smell very bad, or at least ours does. That first year I thought some poor animal had crawled up under our bedroom window and died -- days ago!! I had to hold my breath walking through the yard. I went from the wonderful fragrance of lilacs to these. Not a good progression. 

For some reason, this year the blooms didn't smell as awful. Of course the last few years we've had the air conditioning and haven't had to have our windows open to the stinking fragrance. And it may have not bloomed as heavily as it did those earlier years. 

But that's not the only problem with this tree. The outer shells of the chestnut is neat, don't you think? Well, it is also very, very sticky, and it is almost impossible to pick one of them up without getting small needles in your fingers. When I first discovered this, my grandson was about two and running around barefoot in the yard. He got a foot full of these stickers. Impossible to see, but painful. So I picked up every one of the chestnuts and even the bits of the shells I could find and removed it from the yard. 

Still, every tree has its own special charms. I'm sure someday I'll figure out a charm for this one. In fact, I went online to look the tree up and in the pictures I found the trees did look charming. Maybe I need to give ours some fertilizer or something. 

I do have to note a couple of the great guesses. Loretta guessed hollyhocks and took me back to my childhood when I loved playing with hollyhock seeds. Not that they looked much like chestnuts, but it was still a fun memory. Ann guessed a burr thingy. That could cover a lot of burr seeds. :) And Amy had the fun guess of a caterpillar. If you squint your eyes and use your imagination, you can see that caterpillar and then you can think about how in some weird way the caterpillar might be considered a butterfly seed. LOL. 

Thank you all for guessing and making this mystery seed contest fun. This post's seeds might be easier for you. So what do you think? Do you know what the picture of seeds is this time? I can't wait to read your guesses. 

But while I'm waiting for you to read this, I'm going to go out on the deck and look at the ocean a while here in Monterey Bay where I've been at a writers' retreat. I need to hurry because the sun is going down and the day is fleeing. Tomorrow, I have to get on the airplane and fly home. Looking forward to being home again too and seeing my husband and taking Oscar for a walk. 

As always, thanks for reading.

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.