Tis the season...

The sun is streaming into our front picture windows so I've positioned my chair right in the path of the warm rays!  Jason and I were too eager to head out for a morning jog together (taking advantage of a "childless" morning), and didn't get around to starting a fire.  The sun will take over from here!

The girls are enjoying a sleepover with Aunt Emily and Uncle Jonas.  It was nice for Jason and I to have some concentrated time together again, as we were likely to go through complete withdraw after our luxurious Thanksgiving time away.  It was everything (and much more than) we could have hoped for.  We had planned to head to West Virginia on Wednesday but ended up going over Tuesday to beat the snow storm; an excellent decision!  We planned to spend the time with my parents but Mom had also reserved the family cabin down the road for Jason and I to slip away to as much as it made sense to do so and as much as the girls were comfortable with that plan.

Well, as it turns out, they were 100% comfortable with us being gone!  Kali was gracious and welcomed us back warmly each afternoon. Alida...not so much!  Anytime we would reappear, she would ask why we were there and made it quite clear that she liked it better with just Grandma, Grandpa and Kali.  It was nice to know she didn't "need" us, but I wouldn't have minded had she "wanted" us just a tad more!  In all honesty, though, it was a glorious feeling to know that we were having a wonderful time and so were the girls, and I think the grandparents enjoyed it too!  The snow added additional fun and beauty to our time in the mountains!

This was not staged - I actually picked these 7 letters during one of our many Upwords games!

Kali spent hours out in the snow and it seemed that Alida's favorite was sledding after dark!

On the last day I wondered out loud to Jason how long it would take for us to get tired of our WV schedule: wake up without an alarm, enjoy a hot drink and breakfast over a game of Upwords, do some yoga together or read out loud or to ourselves, beat Jason in another game of Upwords over lunch, hike back to Mom and Dad's together, spend the afternoon relaxing/playing games, eat supper with them and then do some more relaxing and games, and then head back to the cabin for the night.  Let's just put it this way - we weren't tired of it by Sunday when it was time to head back over the 4 mountains...

One of the surprising parts of our four full days there was that Alida nursed to sleep for her nap each afternoon. On the last day there, I had Jason come up and take some pictures once she had fallen asleep. Over the course of those days, I had the strong sense that we were coming to the end of an era.  Kali nursed until her 3rd birthday.  Alida is going on 3 3/4 years old and at our last family meeting noted that she might stop when she is 5.  I'm not sure the stars are going to align for that to be true.  In reality, she hardly ever asks to nurse anymore (she went about 4 days this week without even thinking about it until I mentioned it).  There isn't much there anymore to extract even if she was still good at it. And, on that last point, it seems that she is actually kind of losing the knowledge of how to nurse.  On one hand it is kind of humorous, on the other it's kind of uncomfortable.  At our family meeting, we talked about doing something special to mark the end of nursing, but she didn't seem very interested in that.  From what I can tell, it seems like it is just going to phase out peacefully without much attention given to the transition. Jason asked me the other day if I'm ready for the end.  I'm really not sure, but ready or not it seems to be fast approaching.

The girls helped Mom decorate for Christmas while we were there and so they were all practiced up for our return home!  Our first day back, Jason and the girls scouted out a tree on our property for our front room and we got our the Christmas tunes and danced and decorated!  While I find the lessening of daylight hours at this time of year difficult, I do enjoy the ritual of plugging in the Christmas lights, getting a fire going in the wood stove and playing Christmas music. We are also enjoying more games of Backgammon and Turkey Feet and have just started in on 2014 popcorn taste testing!  I also love the time of year where soup is about the right thing for every meal.  I'm thoroughly enjoying getting reacquainted with beans and squash and potatoes.

So, like every season of the year, there are things that I enjoy and look forward to and things that will make me welcome the next season when the time arrives.  For now, I'm about to get reacquainted with our kiddos, who are headed back our way...

What we need is in the sky!

Janelle wanted me to generate a post about biochar; she liked the way I described it to a friend and thought my take on it might be helpful to a larger audience…does our blog readership constitute a larger audience?  Oh, well, it’s the largest we’ve got!

So what if I implied to you that the problem with the global climate change conversation is that we’re seeing atmospheric carbon as a troublesome burden, when really it’s a tremendously underutilized resource for solving the most pressing problems of agriculture?  Would that make you sit up and pay attention?  Agricultural activity over the past 10,000 years has acted to drive our precious soil carbon out of the soil and into the sky.  This has been a profound loss…we need to find ways to reverse this process and invite the carbon out of the atmosphere and back into our soils where it belongs; where it is so badly needed.

I’ll start my explanation with a few paragraphs (I’ll try to be succinct) about biochar facts and history.  Pyrolyzed (charred) wood has been used accidentally and/or purposefully for millennia by humans as a soil amendment and a fuel (as charcoal).  Char is created by partially burning wood…that is to say halting the combustion reaction before it turns the wood completely to ash.  Those little black chunks left over in your fire pit after a cookout…that’s char.  By manipulating the burn setting and process, a person can make it so that there is a whole lot of black stuff left over and comparatively little ash.  Traditionally this has been achieved by creating a smoldering fire with limited oxygen, and extinguishing the burn prematurely when the desired level of pyrolysis (charring) has occurred. 

Medical practitioners and others will be familiar with another property of char…it is great at grabbing many kinds of chemical substances and holding on to them.  Typically the more reactive the substance, the more char wants it, so reactive toxins like heavy metals can be cleared from the body by ingesting charcoal.  I believe this is the process known as chelation.  It should not be done willy-nilly--so don’t go swallowing chunks of char as a bonus detox—because when char finishes with grabbing the most reactive stuff, it moves right into the less reactive stuff and grabs that, too.  So it can deplete the body of valuable minerals and the like if overdone.

You would think, then, that char would make a terrible soil amendment, since it is so hungry for nutrients.  Indeed it must be used with caution.  If you mix it with your garden soil straight from the fire, the reports are that there is nothing more capable of starving your plants in a hurry.  However if before you add it to the soil you “charge” it (fully stock its storage capacity) with beneficial plant nutrients, it becomes a wonderful nutrient reservoir that plants and soil microbes can draw from and deposit into over the long term.  So charging it with nutrients is what makes “char” into “biochar.”  This nutrient-bank function is one of the same roles that clay serves in the soil, but char is better at it and has other benefits.  Read on.

There is nothing more important in soil health than organic matter (dead bits of plants and other life-sourced matter).  Organic matter makes the soil lighter and easier for roots to penetrate and colonize, it provides habitat for the huge diversity and number of organisms that make up a healthy soil, it promotes healthy aeration and stores soil water and nutrients.  There are myriad types and sources of organic matter, each with its own properties.  Some stays in the soil only a little while before it degrades (fueling a plant smorgasbord of nutrient exchanges) and returns to the air as carbon dioxide, some stays around for several years, some for hundreds of years.  Pyrolyzed organic matter (char bits) is the most permanent type, lasting in the soil not for hundreds of years but thousands!  For agricultural systems purposes, then, it can be thought of as a permanent form of organic matter.  For the nation that has squandered its topsoil at devastating rates over the last century and a half, this should be a pretty attention-getting little factoid!

At this point it is worth asking the question:  Where did the plants and trees we make biochar from get their carbon in the first place?  The answer may surprise some folks:  From the air.  Atmospheric carbon dioxide.  The very same supply of carbon dioxide that is pressure-cooking our planet.  So put it together with me here:

• There used to be a lot of carbon in the soil, in the form of organic matter.  That was good!
•  We plowed the soil, allowing the topsoil to erode and promoting decay/oxidation of that organic matter, driving it into the air (one third of CO2 overproduction has been from this source).  That was bad!
• We learned how to burn high-carbon fossil fuels for extra energy, releasing even more carbon and letting us plow even more.  That was very bad!
• Trees and plants use atmospheric CO2 to build their tissues, reducing atmospheric carbon.  Yay!
• Charring this plant tissue immobilizes it and renders it a permanent soil asset, keeping it out of the atmosphere over the very long term.  So the more biochar we hungrily generate to feed our starving soils, the more we solve our climate problem.  Holy Cow!

And speaking of cows, using a combination of prescribed burns (grasses pyrolyze, too!) and skillful rotational grazing is perhaps the most powerful way of reducing atmospheric carbon while building agricultural soils for the long term.  In fact, grass fires are part of how I got interested in biochar.  I had read about archeological digs in which there were found pieces of char from cooking fires that had lasted for many thousands of years in the soil, virtually unchanged.  It got me thinking about whether this process could be used to sequester carbon, especially if half-burned grass bits could be the material in question, since grass regenerates so quickly after fires.  So I fired up ye olde search engine and, sure enough, there was this whole body of knowledge and inquiry around the topic.  It turns out that this was one of the major factors in building the fantastic topsoils of the American Midwest.  Prairie fires, intentional and accidental, have been a conditioning and capacity-building influence for as long as humans have lived there.

Perhaps the most stunning example of the soil-creating powers of char comes from the Terra Preta soils of the South American tropics.  I am unclear on whether these are known to have been intentionally created, but the story goes that when researchers looked into the back story of some fabulously productive, seemingly inexhaustible soils in the Amazon (I think), they found that the soils were built from leftover char from cooking fires accumulated to something like a twenty foot depth over the millennia in these locations, and that time had allowed full charging of the char.  The result was jaw-dropping, and I find the implications staggering.  Give me some of that!  Never was the Permaculture maxim of misallocated or excess resources equaling pollution so clearly demonstrated.  Carbon is a resource, folks.  And if there is one thing modern western culture is good at, it is exploiting resources.  There is even the possibility in my mind that if we got good at putting carbon to excellent use in our soils, we might even end up with a more productive planet than we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity.  Stick with me a minute:  Two-thirds of the CO2 resource has come from carbon that’s been out of commission since the dinosaurs.  If we can get a hold of that, too, and add it to carbon-poor soils around the globe, we might be sitting pretty, even with 7 billion of us and rising, albeit with a nod to the law of unintended consequences.

So how might we go about tapping into this resource?  On a large scale (municipal, industrial) it needs some kind of “through-process” system to be efficient, perhaps making use of agricultural and sylvicultural (tree-growing) wastes or by-products such as tree tops from sustainable wood products, orchard prunings, corn stalks, wheat straw and chaff, etc.  On a small decentralized scale, this is almost surely going to be done in batches (my first attempt is described in the last blog entry), with the exception of grassland management systems, which are more infinitely scalable.  Some of the most exciting developments I see are systems being built for home-scale use (many could be adapted for larger work) that are using the surplus heat from biochar kilns to provide domestic hot water, home heat, greenhouse heating, cooking heat, and the like.  There is potential for using the excess gases to run internal combustion engines, and one creative company has even managed to refine jet fuel and other hydrocarbons from them!  Of course, one worries about the consequences of Americans learning how to burn trees to make their SUVs run…

Much of my information about technical developments in biochar come from Wayne Teel, our local biochar tinkerer extraordinaire, and a JMU professor in sustainable agriculture specializing in agroforestry.  It can be done on almost any scale, and we need lots of common people playing with it to create a fertile environment for innovation and acceptance on a broad and/or large scale.  Before long the corporations may recognize what a valuable resource is in the air over our heads and all around us…then they’ll find a way to claim it for themselves and charge us for it!  Get it while you can!

Until December...

Dark is falling and so I expect Jason to reappear any moment.  He was out enjoying one last stint in the tree stand.  No luck harvesting a deer for our canning shelves and freezer but it seems he is hardly disappointed about the hours spent in the woods!  We didn't expect that he would have the luxury of taking some time there this evening as we are starting our travels almost a day early to beat the pending snow storm.  But it's been a relaxed day getting ready and so he is enjoying watching his chickens forage in the woods (without any deer for company).

We've had a few "firsts" in the last week or so that seem worth documenting here for the fun of looking back on it.

The first was that I'm now in the habit of making our sauerkraut and having some on hand.  Alida tasted it a long time ago and enjoyed it but she has more recently acquired a thing against sauerkraut made with green cabbage. That may be in part because we had some pink sauerkraut that her aunt had made and that has become the only kind she wishes to eat. She was asking, multiple times, for us to make the pink kind.  So we did!  Right now it looks very purple so we'll see what happens in the coming 4 weeks or so.  I'm grateful for my new (or better said repurposed) stomper that makes the job much easier.  I was amused by Alida's methods - not exactly the most efficient in getting the juices out of the cabbage but entertaining to watch:



The second new thing was we have our very first biochar pit.  We hope it is the first of many!  Jason had heard of the pit method of making biochar (pyrolyzed woody debris to be charged with nutrients before use as a soil amendment) and got the idea of using a biochar pit as the base for our next composting toilet dumping station.  That way the biochar would be there to soak up what leaches into the ground and would act as a filter, while charging the biochar at the same time.  Then a few years down the road when we use the compost, beneath it we will have an incredible soil amendment and in the process we'll have sequestered a little carbon - bonus!  It was a simple process, that Alida got really into helping with until she got a little scratch on her finger from the brush.  I imagine a future blog post from Jason is in order to get his reflections on his recent stints in the tree stand and the biochar adventure.

And, finally, I made pure 100% wheat grass juice today. Wowzers!  So we don't grow enough wheat to grind it into flour but we grow plenty to have a little wheat grass farm. We've grown it off and on for months and I've blended it with water, strained it and used in smoothies. However, upon more reading recently, it seems the best shot of nutrients is when you have 100% wheat grass juice immediately after extracting it.  Supposedly 1 oz of the stuff is equivalent to about 2 lb of veggies (I'm not vouching for this site, but if even 10% of these claims have any validity, it's pretty amazing stuff: http://thechalkboardmag.com/50-reasons-to-drink-wheatgrass-everyday).

I used Jason's meat grinder and full colander of wheat grass gave me 3 one-ounce shots of pure wheat grass juice.  Yep, that's it!  I took one "shot" down to Jason who was dousing his biochar pit with water and we toasted our wheat grass juice and then partook of it (making a number of faces in the process).  It sure tastes like it would have some kind of impact! I'm not sure I have anything to compare it to.  The last ounce went into a yummy banana strawberry smoothie for the girls.

It's fun to feel space opening up in my days at home to experiment with more things like this.  Who knows what I'll be cooking up in the kitchen by the end of the winter!  It's also fun to have Alida and Kali both being highly interested in participating...  I'm looking forward to expanding my array of food options come December 1 when my current 60-day food experiment comes to an end.  In the meantime, I've been enjoying lots of amazing salads with lettuce from our garden, red cabbage from our neighbor next door, kale from our garden or next door, and a parsley pesto yogurt dressing with parsley from our friend's farm and lots of garlic from ours.

But now we must turn our attention to moving westward!  This has been a long anticipated trip - time to savor with family, time for Jason and I to spend together while the girls entertain and are entertained by grandparents, time away from our project list (one last hurrah before the bathroom remodel commences), and time in the mountains.  And it looks like we might get to enjoy some snow too!

Leaves, leaves and more leaves

Since the temperature is hardly to crest freezing today and it's windy, Kali offered to spare Alida the nappy walk with me and they are snuggled up side by side in their bunk bed reading stories.  Since Alida popped awake at 6:30 when I jumped out of bed to check on whether the sound I heard was Jason coming in from the tree stand, odds are good that story time will end in a nap. Especially since, unlike me, Kali is not lulled to sleep by reading out loud. I'm amazed at her stamina as I'm completely incapable of lasting more than about 10 minutes.  So walks work well for me, trying to outlast Alida reading stories does not!

The house is quiet other than the wind chimes on the porch and the soft sound of Kali reading.  Jason is out putting a thick layer of mulch on all the plants that are especially vulnerable to a hard freeze, which is coming our way tonight!  We've covered a lot of lettuce in hopes that we'll continue to enjoy fresh salads for awhile yet.  The only other things that looks relatively green still are the perennial onions.  Otherwise, we are starting to dig into the root cellar, pantry and freezer supplies.  And it's about time since all are pretty much full to the brim.   I chopped up the last green peppers this morning so a few more salads and we'll be on to dried or frozen ones.  I guess these "endings" could feel sad or we could choose to just switch to buying from the grocery store the things we can't grow fresh in November.  Instead I gravitate so much towards living by the seasons and love to see our girls naturally doing the same.  They don't seem at all bothered by the fact that we won't be eating fresh tomatoes again until about July.  When July comes they will taste oh so delicious!  In the meantime, who can complain when there are bright orange sweet potatoes awaiting us in the root cellar!

Since the last posting the little pond has been completed and we have continued to harvest leaves as fast as our arms and legs will let us, and with as much spare time as we have available.  We have more or less an abundant supply at our fingertips (due to several neighbors with lots of trees and no desire to use the leaves), but I think we are about out of time to gather more for this fall.  Jason used one load of leaves from the city to mulch in the kitchen garden for the winter and it is looking rather sharp!  You can see in the background of this picture down near the composting chicken coop the growing pile of leaves from our raking endeavors.  That is one of two locations where we have stock piled ones we weren't ready to use immediately.

We ended the month of October together as a family in West Virginia with friends - a great way to ring in November!  The night before we left, we hosted a blood drive in honor of Nora and the place was buzzing with action (as well as some buzzing lips for those donating platelets).  I think it was our highest number of donations of any drive we have done.  It was a special gathering of people that knew Nora and some that have only gotten to know her through us since her death.  I did not try to donate as I still didn't feel able to honestly answer the question "do you feel healthy and well today" with a "yes" so I left feeling grateful for all who gave but sad that I wasn't among the actual donors.  Hopefully my time will come again, and in the meantime I hope to help facilitate others giving more regularly - most notably my hubby!

I've been enjoying taking more time lately to play with the girls.  The cold outdoors and less daylight helps. And maybe my mindfulness class is instilling some new patterns and habits in me - I hope!  I have also chosen playing backgammon with Kali over my mindfulness homework a couple of times, attempting of course to play backgammon mindfully!  The girls and I did some organizing, sorting and paring down of our toys and games recently and decided that we are going to go through our game cabinet and try the games we have never played and decide if we like them or not (rather than just letting them sit there).  We've tried out 3 thus far and 2 of them are in the Gift and Thrift bag.  Kali is such a delight to sort things with now that I'd have a hard time remembering our struggles when I tried to get rid of surplus stuff IF Alida wasn't coming along behind and currently deeply embedded in the, "I like that" and "I want to keep it" phase.

The leaf raking has kept Jason from getting on with the winter construction projects so we are not on target to have our bed done by Thanksgiving in order to dive into the bathroom project in December.  I usually come around, and at this point I've settled on not worrying too much about our self imposed deadlines. I may have to be reminded of that resolution, but currently it feels more worth it to enjoy the process of the things we are doing, which are highly enjoyable when not under time pressure, and get to the construction projects as we are able.  So the occasional game together all four of us, or not setting an alarm in the morning (though recently Jason has been up before dawn heading out to the tree stand to welcome the day from his perch - thus far he has come in noting "lots of luck but no deer."), or including the girls in our activities even if it extends the time a certain job takes feel so very worth it.  It was really fun this morning to work with Alida on shelling out her popcorn and selecting the pinkest kernels for seed for her to plant next year.  Our girls have a good dose of Jason's genes, that's for sure.  As Alida and I are working at it, she makes it very clear that she is not interested in any candy stripe kernels so I needed to hone my selection skills a bit more.  Kali also can talk for about as long as anyone will listen about her breeding plan with her corn.  I love it!

And we are getting some seeds in the ground even yet.  Jason and Jonathan worked up some new soil that the ducks and chickens had a first go round with.  This area will be in electric fencing by the next growing season since it housed our mostly failed three sisters planting this year (thanks to the critters).  Jason got all the shallots planted there recently.  The main gardening tasks now needing attention are a continuation of weeding and mulching. We had hoped to get to the garlic before the hard freeze but we'll have to just hope it makes it until we get around to it!

Clearly there are not "enough" hours in our days but we'd probably fill any additional ones we had.  We just won't get all the leaves raked or all the weeding done or...  I'm attempting to be ok with that and enjoy the time we do have together to work at the things we love being part of.  It's a good life!  Now if we (Jason and me) could fit a few naps in here and there, we'd be even better off!  Alida is the main one that still gets to sack out for a few hours each afternoon, and she is the one most vocal about not enjoying naps!  Speaking of naps, the jury is still out on whether reading or a nappy walk will do the trick!

October musings...

Alida didn't even make it onto the driveway today before she sacked out, so my walk was much quieter than it normally is.  On a typical day I get to hear selections from her repertoire of songs, along with her chatter about this and that until she allows sleep to overtake her.  Today I just had my own thoughts to keep me occupied, which never seems to be very hard to do.  It seems that the last number of Octobers have kind of caught my by surprise.  September goes out with the bang - the garden season winding to a close, Jason and I both celebrating another year of life and then October arrives...

I'll admit to being rather uncertain as to what my body is trying to communicate with me these days, and what the triggers of the various thoughts and feeling coursing through me are.  It could be just a natural let down after the spring and summer rush.  It might be the extent to which a lot of my extra emotional energy has gone towards thinking about and being present to people close to me who are journeying through difficult times.  It could be that I'm eating an odd and restrictive diet as one of my current attempts to get to the bottom of why I haven't felt like myself for going on a year now.  Or it could be that my body remembers this month very deeply.

My guess is that it is a mixture of all of the above.  This time 7 years ago we were anxiously wondering when we would meet in person the baby inside me who had caused such an uproar in her last several months in utero.  I was on bed rest and taking in the changing colors on the mountain from the hammock, while Kali baked me various flavors of pine needle cakes.  I love watching the color creep down the mountain and I simultaneously feel little surges of emotions when it starts to happen.

This year there have been a few other random odd triggers.  As another avenue to try to address some of my underlying health concerns, some of which may have stress and/or anxiety at their root, I signed up for an 8 week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program.  As predicted, it's challenging (I'm trying to absorb and believe that one can't fail at mindfulness), but I'm glad I'm doing it.  Finding the hour or so daily for practice has been the hardest part and many a meditation session has ended in a nap.  The class is held at the local hospital and weekly I get a little mental trip back to our time with Nora in the NICU.  They must use the same soap as they do at UVA.  When I wash my hands, the smell seems to transport me to the sink outside the NICU where we would wash before going in to be at Nora's side.  I almost welcome the transport back, but it surprises me sometimes when it happens when I'm not expecting it.

I'm grateful that this week we'll have a number of times and ways to remember Nora.  We'll be hosting another blood drive on the eve of her birth and then driving over the mountains to WV to be with family and friends on her birthday and the weekend following.  Spending time as a family and with those I love and who love me around the anniversary of her birth is what I always crave.

In other news, recent days have marked a few other changes and transitions around here.  We've now had two frosts and our harvests are getting down to amounts that I can carry in my hand - a bunch of parsley, sprigs of fresh dill, a few trombone squashes, a pepper or two, mint teas, perennial onions, fennel for munching on, raspberries that never get as far as the house...  We are now in the business of harvesting leaves and pine needles and tucking beds in for the winter.  It's fun to note the changes even from last year - Kali helping to rake and Alida content to be outside with us for longer than even my stamina will allow.  She often pretends that she is playing a soccer game using leaves.  As long as I can keep her on track with which way the "balls" are supposed to be flying, she can actually be sort of helpful.

We had our first fire in the wood stove the other night and a fire in the wood stove does about the same thing to me that a baby sleeping on my chest does; slows me down in that good, cozy kind of way. Kali was reading in the front room, Jason and Alida were playing tiddly-winks and I was watching the flames dance.  After a bit, Jason came up behind me and starting playing with my hair. I knew at that moment that the end of any productivity on my part for the day had come!  He literally had to drag me to bed and plop me in!

We have also recommissioned our composting toilet.  After a several month hiatus due to running out of cover materials (a very essential component of the system), we have restocked with leaves from the city.  Jason and the girls hope to make as many trips as possible to get leaves as our goal would be to use the compost potty year round.  And when we start our bathroom remodel after Thanksgiving it will be even more important since we plan to move our bathroom (by moving the compost potty) into the back kitchen.  Our best estimate has us finishing up that remodeling project right around Alida's 4th birthday at the end of March!

And, finally, even though the harvest season is winding to a close, there is new life springing up around us even now.  The many cover crops that Jason has been working on getting in, along with Jonathan's help, have sprouted and we are eating lettuce as fast as we can without making a dent in it (if you are local and read our blog and want lettuce, come on out anytime...).   And the garlic is sprouting!  Now since most of the covers crops are in and the ground is soft from good rains recently, Jason and Jonathan have been doing a fair amount of digging and the little pond is almost done, other than spreading clay up the sides to create a natural lining. Exciting!  We might have some fish before too long.  

Fall planting, last harvests...

I just flipped through the last few blog posts to check if I was behind or caught up on the highlights of recent happenings.  It sure appears that we are more in fall/winter mode with multiple outings away from the homestead!  But there is plenty happening on the home front too, and some of my favorite tasks!  I've discovered that a lot of the tasks at the beginning and end of the season suit me really well.  The spring weeding frenzy and the fall garden cleanup and leaf mulching are both very good matches to my personality.  A very clear task with obvious visible results is lovely!  So I've been chopping away at dead tomato and pepper plants and bean vines at every available opportunity!  In other pockets of time there has been little bits of harvesting - just enough to keep my dehydrator humming away most moments of the last few weeks.  We did have our first light frost this week but now have a stretch without cold nights.  We keep wondering when the first fire in the wood stove will be needed.  There have been some cool nights but I love cuddling up with my family so haven't wanted to warm the air too much!  Last evening I enjoyed a delayed birthday treat from the girls - a complete hairdo session with me dosing on the living room floor.  Lovely!

Here's what Alida was doing that made me think I could squeeze a blog post in - she has since awaken!

Some of the things harvested the day before a possible frost was in the forecast.  To the far right are paprika peppers - how fun to have three containers of our very own dried/ground paprika.  We'll be growing those again!

The last of the peppers - many will go in the dehydrator - and some of the last summer squash (the trombone squash want to keep going so we'll see when the actual last one is harvested.

The "cream of the crop" for planting.  Jason was sure he had plenty of seed and what he saved out only planted about half our field so we had to dive into our eating supply.

The girls don't want to miss out on much these days - here they are headed to the garlic field.

The girls and I got in on the easy part!  Jason and Jonathan had worked all day the day before transforming the patch into plantable soil.

Kali is now a true help.  She helped with various parts of the project but was proud to plant, cover, and water in one full row all by herself!

Peanut digging time!

We are trying a new method this year of drying them on the vine for a few weeks...

The number of jars of dried things are growing in the pantry - who knew dried squash could be so very tasty.  We've also got lots of tomatoes, peppers, some onions, corn, and ground cherries.

This is the way the counter looks many mornings when I'm just getting started with a day at home.  Most of it will be in our bellies by the end of the day!

Here's the largest of the trombone squash - summer squash that turns to a winter squash if left on the vine. This one will provide plenty of seed, enough to share!  And lots of squash - weighed in at about 20lb.

Corn harvest - suffered greatly due to deer and groundhog pressure.

I need to unload the dryer and get some peppers going...

One of our favorite things to harvest - sweet potatoes!

Both girls were loving it until Alida got dirt in her sock. :)

Yum!

There were some biggies!

Our last watermelon was consumed just before we welcomed October. It's funny how I don't feel sad as one season ends because the next one has its own things to look forward to!