Since I mentioned the frost in the last update, I thought I'd give a few end of the growing season updates, including preparations for our first freeze - the final harvests, cover cropping and tucking in gardens for the winter. There's still more to be done and I made the unwise move of looking at our 2022 calendar last evening when Jason and I were already mostly spent for the day. Our first frost was 2 weeks earlier last year so after a quick glance over things I felt about 2 weeks behind on all the things that will need to be done in the coming days/weeks. I'm glad Jason can be mostly focused on the home front for a little stretch here.
When I last wrote, I was home from a concert due to Terah being sick. Unlike the previous cold that made its way through most of us over the course of a few weeks, this one was quick and really only impacted Terah. She missed out on much of a family gardening day, but even felt good enough (thanks medicine!) to come out for a bit of the sweet potato digging and a little tree climbing. I was gearing up for a lot of logistical rearranging and some sad cancellations when it became apparent that this particular virus was gonna exit about as fast as it arrived.
So here's a smattering of updates from the land in no particular order!
We did round 1 of our PA Dutch Squash harvest when the first frost threatened (but didn't materialize).
We also got in all the mature Trombone Squash. We are still VERY impressed by this plant! I just cut one open recently from LAST year and it was solid all the way through with nice plump seeds (the flavor was lacking in sweetness after sitting in our root cellar for over a year, but we aren't holding that against it).
It's always fun to download photos from Jason's phone and see what strikes his fancy. He gets the credit for these perky little barley plants coming up. Most of the fall cover cropping is in as of dark last evening, but there will still be the final section of the pig paddocks to plant in rye once we get them moved to their winter quarters. Jason spent much of a day with our neighbor getting the new hog panels welded and ready to make their corral in the dryland garden.
While we've been mostly focused outside, there's been some seed processing happening inside in the nooks and crannies of the days. Here Jason is showing the impressive variation in two types of buckwheat grown this year.
And here he is showing off some dry beans. We can give thanks to his dear friend Craig for many of these photos, as they are often taken with the intention of shooting a text off to him with a seed breeding thought or challenge or excitement or...
We waited just as long as we could (until this past weekend) to harvest all the corn. It could have used a bit more time, but had we left it in the field much longer the chipmunks would have stolen (I can call it that, right??) even more of the girls' popcorn.
We had a lunch picnic on the corn harvesting day and the row of raspberries, muscadine grapes, last cherry tomatoes, jujubes and kiwis I harvested that morning made me very happy!
We've been savoring roasted delicata squash, while simultaneously testing them to see which we want to keep seeds from for next year's planting. We are not breeding for triplet squashes, but we did get one this year. We are starting in on our taste testing much earlier this year and there have been some winners. I do think I found one that must have crossed with something else (a gourd?) as I cannot cut it with our sharpest butcher knife.
This year prior to digging the sweet potatoes and after we had gotten any of the growing tips of the vines for our own eating, we cut out the vines and gave the pigs a hearty helping (a couple wheelbarrow loads) daily until they were used up. I absolutely love taking weeds and vegetable matter we aren't using to our piggies.
Our sweet potato harvest was much less than other years (they had a slow and rough start, along with a few groundhog visits), but way better than the white potatoes. We will still have lots of bushels of delicious tubers to take us through the winter.
The food processing has slowed down (right as the milk supply has picked up, so I've got my first cheddar in months going today). It's down to drying paprika peppers, cutting up the last of the sweet peppers and using up some immature winter squash in whatever creative ways I can. Oh, I guess we are going to a neighbor's farm today to get several bushes of broccoli and cabbage so there may be some broccoli freezing and sauerkraut making in my future!
Even after this freeze, we'll still have a smattering of fruits to harvest. The kiwis are almost done 😢 but there are still lots of persimmons and jujubes on the tree and the white raspberries look like they'll give us a few more flushes of fruit (especially since we'll be in the high 70's much of the rest of this week).
Jason bought a new ladder for his business but it has already earned its keep along the front walk. For those that do not know the story of our jujube tree pictured here: There was a beautiful large tree beside the front walk of our first basement apartment on Hamlet Dr. We didn't know what it was at the time but it dropped these interesting little fruits on our sidewalk in the fall. When we purchased our first home on Wolfe St, I was pregnant with Kali and we dug up a little shoot of this tree and planted it at a baby blessing event with friends and family after Kali's birth. Then when we moved to Fruit Farm Lane we dug that little tree up and planted it in our front flowerbed. Now 18 years later, it drops its interesting fruits (which we now know by name) on our walkway just like it did at our first apartment. And this year there is a bumper crop AND the fun of climbing high to harvest it!
It could also be a bumper crop of black walnuts this year too, if we had the time/energy to make use of them all. We were going to let them go entirely but we had a family competition (friendly and more or less collaborative) to see how many buckets we could fill in 10 (or was it 15) minutes. We now have 8 5-gallon buckets of black walnuts waiting to be processed...
Our home is full of marigold bouquets right now. It was VERY hard to cut up these plants still full of buds and blossoms. But after harvesting more seed than we could ever plant, we chopped them up for mulch to make way for seeding the winter wheat. Jason was away working that day, so it was a Tangly Woods' gals' gardening afternoon. We chopped up LOTS of plant material and got the tomato trellising disassembled and stored away in the "wire yard." Yep, we were kinda proud of ourselves!!
Jason has done most of the actual cover cropping (other than me helping the some peas/wheat last night when we were racing the sun). Here he's getting our fall spinach seeded where the sweet peppers and mahon yams were.
Much more could be said about this, but that gives you/us an idea of what we've been up to. And to end, can you tell I just do not tire of the mountain in our backdrop and the way the clouds change its appearance so much from day to day?!
I don't think I can do a better job describing the week with words than these pictures can do. In summary the days together were full of laughter, sweet times of connecting, good conversation, delicious foods, a shadow puppet show, chicken training and nonstop fun and play for the kids! 
With our kids at the age where they can mostly fend for themselves AND love playing together, Colette and I got to enjoy not one but two hikes on the mountain together. It's a unique gift for me to have someone who has some shared family history/heritage with me and with whom I share so many interests and who is navigating some of the same kinds of life challenges and blessings and who shares a posture of curiosity towards the world and is always learning and growing and sometimes unlearning. It was such precious time together!!
During the week, I would pop upstairs to check on my aunt and we kinda have a running joke of me snapping pictures of her without her knowing it. There wasn't much chance of her catching me while snoozing! 
I also got a funny series of pictures of the three of us together. There's not one where we are all smiling at the camera. This was partly because Aunt Eleanor was trying to figure out how we were taking a picture of ourselves and seeing ourselves on the phone screen. 
Smack dab in the middle of our week together was Terah's 8th birthday (post on that forthcoming!). So they got in on some of the fun birthday celebrations and Terah got a long spread out week of celebrations. She was ok "sharing" her birthday with others as long as we could have a "fake birthday" with just the 5 of us! 😉 Her main birthday meal was on the eve of her birth (right around the time 8 years before when I realized I was probably in labor). Jonathan, Christen and Luca were able to join us around the outdoor fire for a feast of roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, roasted sweet potatoes, green beans with garlic, fresh sweet peppers and we topped off the meal with s'mores and ice cream cones! Luca helped with scaring the chickens away from the picnic table (I'm so glad he is no longer scared of chickens, and seems to get great satisfaction from realizing that they are actually scared of him if he runs towards them). 
