Spring and summer were late in coming this year and I think fall and winter will be arriving early. I see signs of fall already and it’s just the middle of August. There are trees showing color in places. The goldenrod and asters have begun to bloom. I noticed last week that the robins and swallows are scarce or gone already. We don’t light our gas furnace until October and we don’t usually use the wood stove until late September, but there have been mornings lately when I’ve been tempted to haul in a load of firewood and light it up to take the chill out of the house. I’m not ready for it to get cold yet.
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| Goldenrod. |
We passed a family milestone last week. On Tuesday Josiah passed his learner’s permit exam and is officially a driver in training. He’ll be able to test for his driver’s license in February. He does pretty good most of the time, but I’m glad we live in the country where there is very little traffic. It’s hard to believe we’ve reached this point already. I console myself by remembering that this is the last time I will have to train a teenage driver.
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| Dahlias. |
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| Dahlias. |
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| Late poppies. |
We pulled up the onions on Friday and set them on the back porch to cure for a few weeks. They turned out pretty good this year. In fact, they are the largest onions I’ve ever grown. I don’t know why they grew so big. They must like cool weather. My poor tomatoes won’t amount to anything this year. The vines have green fruit on them, but the chilly weather won’t let them ripen. And all the rain we’ve had has also given them a bad case of the blight, so their days are numbered. I won’t be canning any tomato sauce this year.
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| Josiah with the onions. |
I worked on canning applesauce most of the week. I set a goal to do a batch every morning and that went well until the food mill broke. We’d had that mill a long time and I was sad to see it go. We wore it out. We got a new one on Saturday, a nice stainless steel one. I’ll be trying it out tomorrow. I’m making varietal applesauces this year. Most of our applesauce is made from Yellow Transparent apples, but I’m going to make a small batch of each variety I grow to see how they differ. I made a batch with Sops of Wine apples, a small sweet apple with more complex taste. I have a bucket of Duchess of Oldenburg apples waiting to be sauced tomorrow. There are a dozen other varieties that will ripen over the next two months.
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| This week's batches of applesauce and the new mill. |
Because we’ve had such a cool summer, some things in the garden are already done for the year. The cucumbers succumbed early. The vines have stopped blooming and are turning yellow. I’ll tear them out this week. The green beans have turned yellow and suffered from Japanese beetles. They’ll go into the compost this week too. My garden is starting to look empty, like it’s late September instead of mid August. We’re still picking strawberries and raspberries. That makes me happy. All the crops that like (or don’t mind) cool weather are doing fine – cabbages, broccoli, beets, and carrots.
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| Strawberries in August. |
This week Hannah will leave for school. Her move-in day at the dorms is Wednesday. Her classes don’t start until Monday the 25th. She’s nervous about it all. I am too. I’m glad she’ll be just 40 minutes away. School starts for Josiah on the 25th too. He’ll be a junior this year. The summer has passed too quickly. They always do.
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| Late summer flowers. |
Stacey is also leaving this week on Wednesday to go to Utah to attend our nephew Christopher’s wedding. She plans to spend a day at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. She’ll get to see lots of family and friends. She’ll be home again on Saturday night. With Hannah gone to school and Stacey gone to Utah, Josiah and I will have fend for ourselves for a few days. We’ll do okay, but just okay. We’ll remember to eat at least once a day. We aren’t very good at planning and making meals. We’ll eat a lot of omelettes and toasted cheese sandwiches (things I can make easily that aren’t time consuming and are easy to clean up). And we have lots of applesauce.
