Preparing for winter

It's fall, and the lettuce is definitely done (long since, in fact), so I decided today to till the beds for next spring's planting. When we do this we always till in a mix of peat moss, composted cow manure, and home-grown compost.

As I was shaking most of the contents of a previously-opened bag of cow manure into the lawn cart, I saw some objects that were definitely not cow manure. Closer examination revealed that some enterprising creature (almost certainly a squirrel) had, um, squirreled away a large cache of acorns in our cow manure.

I picked out as many of them as I could find, but I'm sure I didn't get them all. Since one of the beds I was tilling is very near a large oak tree, it gets quite enough volunteer oak seedlings on its own, thank you very much, without our burying extra acorns in it.