Fall is here!

Today is the first day of Fall! Cooler weather..brilliant leaves..pumpkins! Yeah..right! I wish someone would have reminded Mother Nature of this..the temperature here on the Bayou was in the high 90's today making it more like midsummer! I have been looking forward to this season for some time now. We have had a seemingly very hot summer and the promise of cool, crisp evenings sounds Heavenly! I understand that this will not happen overnight but..Fall is here and this makes me happy.

Another thing made me happy today. My sweet daughter bought me two new hummingbird feeders and today there were hummers flitting all about them. These are really very pretty feeders unlike the cheap, plastic ones that I usually have hanging around the garden. The bottle part of this one is a gorgeous soft green glass and it has a coppery-tone base to it. I filled them with fresh nectar and carried them to the rose garden. I needed to install new hanging brackets on the posts as the old ones had rusted and I did not trust them to hold my new feeders. The little hummers could hardly wait until I hung them and as a matter of fact..one did not. I placed the feeder on a garden bench as I installed the new brackets. My skills using a screwdriver are

lacking so it took this took a few minutes. I guess one hummer was really hungry because when I turned to pick up the feeder, it was sipping the nectar while the feeder was still on the bench! I had to wait before hanging the feeder as to not scare it. They are such tiny birds and are really quite fearless. Eventually, it flew to the rose arbor and waited patiently for me to finish. After hanging both feeders, I sat on the bench and watched. Within minutes of hanging them, I counted seven hummers hovering about waiting their turn! This hot weather must have them very thirsty, too!

While out in the back, I noticed the grapefruit tree is well laden again this year. The higher limbs are starting to sag with the weight of the fruit making me wonder about the strength of the limbs. Grapefruit trees must have a very strong wood as these fruits are all hanging on a tiny twig of a limb about the size of a lead pencil. When you consider that each fruit weighs in a more than a pound and there are about twenty-five of them clustered on each limb..well???? I just hope they can hold on for another two months. Sometime in November, they will ripen enough for us to pick. It does appear that we will have a good crop this year!