Little Flowers of the Mountain

Happy October Eve.
The magic of September is witnessing how beautiful change and letting go truly is. Thank you, September. You were a beautiful blessing this year. I let you go and welcome October. Good night, friends. Sleep well. Release, let go, and flow with infinite blessings.

Bee Well
🐝*•.•*❤️🍁❤️

🤎🤎🤎

THE PEANUT WON’T BREAK HIS BONES. A DIET BUILT AROUND THEM CAN.
Late September is one of the busiest times of the year for a squirrel.
Under an oak tree, the ground is beginning to fill.
Acorns drop.
Hickory nuts ripen.
Walnuts hit the leaf litter.
And suddenly every gray squirrel in the neighborhood seems to be carrying something.
One is eating.
One is digging.
Another disappears with an acorn, returns thirty seconds later, and leaves with another.
This is exactly what autumn is supposed to look like.
Then we arrive with peanuts.
They are easy to carry.
Easy to throw.
Squirrels love them.
And because a squirrel grabs one immediately, it feels as though we have given it exactly what it needed.
But the important truth is more complicated:
A peanut is not poison to a squirrel.
An occasional plain, unsalted peanut is not going to make a healthy wild squirrel’s skeleton suddenly collapse.
The problem begins when the handout stops being occasional.
When peanuts, corn, sunflower seeds and other easy human-provided foods start replacing too much of the varied diet the squirrel would otherwise forage for.
That distinction matters.
Wild gray and fox squirrels do not naturally live on one kind of nut.
Their diet changes through the year.
Right now, in fall, acorns, hickory nuts, walnuts and other tree mast become especially important. They also eat seeds, fruits, fungi, buds and other foods as seasons change. Pennsylvania State University and the U.S. Forest Service both describe this broad seasonal diet, with natural tree nuts dominating much of autumn and early winter.
That variety does something a bowl of peanuts cannot:
it prevents one favorite food from becoming the whole diet.
Peanuts, like many nuts and seeds commonly given to squirrels, contain much more phosphorus than calcium.
Normally, that is not a crisis.
Bodies need phosphorus too.
But calcium and phosphorus have to remain in balance.
When a squirrel — especially a young or captive one — is fed a diet dominated by nuts, seeds and corn for long enough, calcium can become inadequate relative to phosphorus.
Then the body has a problem.
Blood still needs calcium for muscles, nerves and other vital functions.
So the animal begins taking calcium from the place where most of it is stored:
the skeleton.
The bones slowly lose strength.
Wildlife rehabilitators call the resulting condition metabolic bone disease.
And this is where the frightening stories about squirrels and peanuts actually come from.
Rehabilitation centers repeatedly receive young squirrels that were “rescued” and then raised on the food people thought squirrels were supposed to eat:
nuts.
Seeds.
Corn.
More nuts.
The animals can initially look perfectly healthy.
Then they become reluctant to climb.
Their hind legs weaken.
They may tremble.
Seizures can appear.
Bones weakened by mineral loss can fracture under stresses a healthy skeleton would tolerate.
The tragedy is not that one peanut was toxic.
The tragedy is that the squirrel was being fed like a cartoon squirrel instead of a real one.
And there is another autumn problem with repeated hand-feeding.
A squirrel learns very quickly where the easiest calories are.
The National Park Service calls this food conditioning.
An animal begins approaching people, patios, roads or parking areas because humans have become part of its feeding routine.
The squirrel that once spent its morning searching beneath trees can start waiting beside the person who arrives with the bag.
And because late September is already the season when squirrels are intensely collecting and storing food, repeated handouts can become particularly attractive.
The animal is programmed to take advantage of abundance.
It does not know that the easiest food is not always the best food to build its entire autumn around.
Washington wildlife officials go even further: they recommend avoiding peanut feeders, noting that squirrels and other species attracted to peanuts are already extremely capable natural foragers and do not need supplemental feeding.
So what should you do when a squirrel appears beneath your oak tree this fall?
Mostly—
nothing.
Let it search.
Let it dig.
Let it reject one acorn and choose another.
Let it disappear into the leaves carrying something you did not provide.
That work is not a sign that the squirrel is struggling.
It is the life it evolved to live.
If you have already tossed the occasional plain peanut to a wild squirrel, there is no reason to panic.
The lesson is not:
“Peanuts are poison.”
They aren’t.
The better lesson is:
don’t turn a treat into a diet.
Because right now, while squirrels race through September leaves building caches for the months ahead, the landscape is already offering them something our handful of peanuts cannot reproduce:
choice.
Acorns.
Hickory.
Walnuts.
Seeds.
Fungi.
Fruit.
Dozens of small decisions spread across hundreds of meals.
A squirrel does not need us to make autumn easier.
Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is let autumn feed it.

From the Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham, picture by Inga Moore

Happy Tuesday, friends.

It’s that time of year again. It is spider season. A time when our eight legged want to join us indoors and create incredible artwork in the garden. You will notice many yellow and black spiders (common garden spiders) in your garden or weaving their beautiful webs around your house. For us on the mountain it is Gardens Spider and Wolf Spider season. We have many coming indoors now throughout the fall to get cozy inside. These are not harmful spiders at all. They are so good for our environment and home. They help rid your home of other insects, spiders and the venomous brown recluse. Please catch and release if you don’t want them inside.

Beautiful lessons come from Spider Medicine with a beautiful message. Her body is in the shape of a figure eight representing infinite possibilities. Her eight legs represent the medicine wheel. Four represents the four directions of the world and the other four represent the four winds of change. Her beautiful web must have a strong foundation much like our web of life. She teaches us patience, creativity, perseverance and strength. She teaches us how life is a delicate balance and everything is connected into one.
We are all connected. We are one.
Blessed is the Spider and Blessed are we.
Much Love and Many Blessings~Melissa
🖤✨🕷✨🖤
Grandmother Spider
Giver of Wisdom

From "The Fairies of The Trees" - Cicely Mary Barker - 1940.

Bees! bees! come to the trees
Where the Lime has hung her treasures;
Come, come, hover and hum;
Come and enjoy your pleasures!
there,

The feast is ready, the guests are bidden; Under the petals the honey is hidden; Like pearls shine the drops of sweetness

And the scent of the Lime-flowers fills the air.
But soon these blossoms pretty and pale
Will all be gone; and the leaf-like sail
Will bear the little round fruits away;
So bees! bees! come while you may!

Happy Tuesday, Friends. It’s a beautiful day with a blessed new season upon us. An immense welcome to the beautiful, magical Autumnal Equinox. Every season has its beauty and magic, but Autumn is the most profound teacher of release and letting go in beauty and grace. May your harvest of blessings be abundant this season.

Bee Well,

Release,

Let go,

& God Bless❤️

~Melissa🐝*•.•*🧡🍁🧡

💛💛💛

That goldfinch working over a spent coneflower head isn't settling for scraps. It's found one of the more reliable food sources standing in your entire yard through the leanest stretch of the year.

Goldfinches have bills shaped almost like small forceps, purpose built for prying seeds out of a tightly packed seed head, which makes coneflower and black-eyed Susan close to ideal targets once the petals have dropped and the center cone dries out. That timing lines up with something else specific to this species. Unlike most songbirds, goldfinches hold onto their duller, non-breeding plumage well into spring rather than molting into bright color early, which means they're relying on foraging through the coldest months without the seasonal camouflage advantage other birds get. A yard full of standing seed heads becomes a dependable, low effort food source exactly when insects and fresh vegetation have mostly disappeared and options are genuinely limited.

The structure of these particular seed heads is part of what makes them so functional through winter specifically. Coneflower's stiff, spiky center cone holds together through repeated freezing, thawing, and snow cover without collapsing the way softer plant material would, which is why you'll often see a finch clinging sideways to a stem in the dead of winter, still working through individual seeds one at a time. Black-eyed Susan's cone center behaves similarly, staying upright and accessible long after the surrounding petals have gone brown and curled.

There's a second layer of value happening below what's visible in this photo. Coneflower and black-eyed Susan both have hollow or pithy stems, and many native bee species use exactly that kind of standing stem to overwinter, tucked inside until temperatures warm enough in spring for them to safely emerge. Cutting everything back in October doesn't just remove a food source for birds like this goldfinch, it can eliminate the shelter an entire generation of pollinators was counting on to survive the season.

None of this requires letting your whole yard go wild through winter. It just means the impulse to tidy everything up in October is worth resisting for these two plants specifically. Leave them standing until late winter or early spring, once new growth is about to emerge and the birds and insects relying on them have had their season, then cut back for the fresh start ahead. 🐦