Recently Nancy and I were flying back from a family wedding in Boulder, Colorado with our granddaughter Hope. I had taken the June copy of Grit magazine for reading material for the flight and happened across a short article on the history and folklore of scarecrows’ by Ruth Ditchfeild.  It was a fun article and after reading it I informed Nancy and Hope that we would make a scarecrow to guard the pumpkin patch when we got back to Timber Butte.   We had planted several hills of giant pumpkinseeds in the spring with the idea that Hope might carve jack-o-lanterns in the fall.  Already the pumpkins had been rapidly gaining weight and size with nearly two months of the growing season yet to go.  We all have high expectations of a personal Timber Butte record.

As planned we spent the next afternoon constructing our gardens’ very first scarecrow.  I built a basic structure out of pine poles while Hope and Nancy designed and constructed the head, hair and face.  We wrapped the body with empty feed bags to give it shape and dressed it with Nancy’s bib-overalls and a worn out pair of boots.

For our first attempt at such a task the final product came out remarkably well except forthe fact that it wasn’t very scary.  Our mystery chicken, previously named Ladyhawk,(who recently turned out to be Theodore the Rooster – see entry #91) was not the least bit intimidated. He in fact found this new garden ornament a wonderful vantage point from which to survey the grasshopper seeking activity of the Bard-rock hens (see entry #104).

All in all, the project was a success with much thanks to Grit magazine for the idea.

Send in a picture of your scarecrow to our comments and we’ll post them just for the fun of it.