September Days

I've probably mentioned it before, but I do love turning the calendar from August to September. September has brought cooler mornings and evenings which I savor after the heat of July and August. And the semester is underway so my work days are less grueling. And the tomatoes are waning, the cucumber beds are now seeded with carrots, and there are less things to can and freeze. There starts to be a tiny bit more wiggle room for the zillion things that have moved from to do list to to do list for many weeks now. A recent example was me giving most of yesterday to that onerous task of getting all the clothes/shoes down from the attic and sorting through them with Alida and Terah to get them the next size up for their dresser drawers and then going through all their existing clothing/shoes to pull out too small things or things that just aren't their "style" (as Terah was apt to say). Jason exerted a lot more physical energy working at clearing the fence row at the bottom of our land, but I think I might have been able to compete with him on who was most exhausted by the end of the day! 

Jason has also been squeezing into the cracks a few projects between harvests and starting in on the fall cover cropping. He finished up the sweet potato curing room in our crawl space and I haven't even been down to see it and photograph it. He also finished up making a large set of various sized corn/bean/grain/seed drying trays that we'll use in our back kitchen this fall for drying things before putting in storage. When I can focus on the progress on those items, there are moments of satisfaction that we are continuing to refine various systems around here. But mostly right now I am often consumed with what we are not managing to get done in any given day or week. Sigh!

In one of Jason's workshop times, Terah joined him. She had been wanting some "shop time with Daddy" and that seemed a good opportunity. So in addition to the seed trays, she finished up with Jason a little table that Kali had started ages ago. To say she was proud of it upon completion would be an understatement!

We have also managed to squeeze in some fun which most recently included sneaking out after dark and decorating my parents' car on the even of their 56th wedding anniversary. My children, and I also learned husband, had never decorated a car after a wedding. So it was high time they learned. Once my parents had left for a day of hiking and time with friends, the younger gals and I also had fun remaking their bed in an alternate way that did not promote ease in climbing in at day's end. It's fun to have their house so handy for such pranks! Though I do fear that I might have some things coming back at me, as it is kind of dangerous to teach one's children these things!

When September rolled around, it was emotionally challenging to take our first family photo without Tala. So instead we all picked something to hold or wear that reminded us of Tala's presence in our home. My dad chose a broom, since Tala so graciously and at her own initiative spent many hours helping to keep our homes clean. Do not ask how it's going downstairs since she left! My mom chose a puzzle to represent the fun of puzzling together. Jason grabbed the orchid Tala had given us when she moved in and which never stopped blooming during her entire time with us. When I looked at it this morning I realized that the many blooms are shriveling and falling. I'm holding a mug of iced coffee, which represents so many things. Kali is holding Rook cards, which she doesn't need any more to play with Tala, though they still play online most nights. Alida is wearing the beautifully handwoven dress made for Tala for her graduation which she gifted to Alida before she left. And Terah is holding Jusr, Tala's bunny entrusted to her that she snuggles with most nights now. We miss her!

After a long dry summer, we've had rain. Inches of it. We have been fortunate to get plenty of rain but mostly not too much. And in doses that have mostly soaked in. We realize that many places have not been nearly so fortunate...We haven't needed to irrigate now for some time. And the rain brings the kind of mist and clouds on the mountain that I love. Thankfully there has also been sufficient sunshine for drying things back out and enabling us to keep up with most of the harvests. Here's just a small sampling of what's growing out there and what's coming in the door!

I do love the look of amaranth heads forming!

We are having a good pepper year!! After a good number of awful pepper years in a row, we are bringing in many sweet red peppers - enough for lots of fresh eating, cooking in recipes and for salsa/sauce and we are even freezing some for winter. Yay! Jason is pretty sure what has been ailing them in recent years was broad mites. 

As things come in the door for processing, I'm so glad the number of helpers who can work with sharp knives keeps increasing. One day Alida and Terah chopped more or less all the tomatoes for canning diced tomatoes. 

While we have more or less decided that we need to give up on growing peaches, we were gifted a large crate full from one of my colleagues. I was able to can 14 pints, we've been eating them fresh for days, I froze a few and tonight we will enjoy peach kuchen that Alida made this morning with the last of them. 

It's the time of year where we are shifting from the summer gardens to fall. Here the cucumbers (which did ok) and watermelon (which did horrible this year) are now out and we have seeded carrots. As soon as I finish this post, I'll head down to give them their daily sprinkling until the seeds germinate.

And then there was the potato harvest! Now with 4 potato forks in the garden shed, we can use lots of help. And the digging was delightful as the soil has changed so much in recent years. Now only if there were a lot of potatoes. It was funny as we got started because I was just so taken with how easy the digging was that I hardly noticed that I wasn't finding many potatoes. 

So the yield was pretty bad. We looked back over recent years and 3 years ago we dug 4.5 bushels, 2 years ago it was 4 bushels, last year it was 3.5 and this year 3. We are clearly going in the wrong direction. We'll savor every potato we eat this year!

To ease the disappointment in the potato harvest, I stopped to take a picture of the cardinal climber vine that is abundant in one of the strips in the root patch. The hummingbirds love it too!

And then we celebrated finishing up potato digging by harvesting the first of two pineapples. We get a pineapple every few years and this year had TWO! As of this morning, they have both been savored and the tops are now in new pots to grow a pineapple each that we'll enjoy a few years hence. They were so delicious!

Alright, I now have an antsy 5 year old (ALMOST 6) on my lap who is going to come with me to water the carrot beds. And I think it's time to turn my attention to other things. I'll end with a fun experiment my mom did recently that was a hit. She made a round of tomato cocktail with all yellow slicer tomatoes. I loved it! And think it was lower in acid such that my taste buds could enjoy it and my mouth not feel raw afterwards. Yum! She also made a mega-batch of relish using trombone squash. We need to make some burgers now to try it out on. The root cellar is looking very colorful!