I accidentally created a feeder for the local titmouse population when I left our sunflowers on the drying racks too long. I had planned to put the sunflowers away in the feed freezer...but I wasn't positive the heads were dry enough and didn't want them to mold. And then the local songbirds started dropping by for a snack.

Next year, I'll take that as my cue to protect the seeds, but this year, we still have about 40 pounds of sunflower seeds from the feed store to go through, and I suspect we won't use it all before spring. So I've just been enjoying letting the titmice dine. It takes a titmouse about as long to eat one seed as it takes Abigail to eat the whole head, so we may continue seeing bird traffic into the new year.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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