Today is the first day of October – one of the most beautiful months of the year here, or one of the most disappointing. We wait all year anticipating the blazing colors of the fall leaves that usually reach their peak in the second week of October. They are the spectacular conclusion to our growing season, one of the highlights of the whole year. But I think we’ll be a bit disappointed this year. This year the trees started to change early and the colors are not bright. I don’t know the science behind what makes the difference. Was it our chilly summer? Too much rain? Too little rain? Whatever the reason, it looks like our fall will be a bit drab this year.
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| Top photo, this year. Bottom photo, last year. |
Our Indian Summer came to an abrupt end on Thursday as a cold front slid in. It brought us rain and the temperature dropped dramatically. On Thursday it was 85° and on Friday the high was only 65°. The heat was nice while it lasted. Last night the temperature fell to 21° and we had a hard, killing frost. I knew it was coming, so yesterday evening I went out and cut all the tender flowers and brought bouquets of them into the house, the last of summer’s glory.
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| Hard frost this morning. |
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| The last bouquets of summer. |
This time of year our house becomes a food production factory. It isn’t a very efficient factory sometimes, but we get the work done one way or another. On Monday Hannah and I picked a basket of tomatoes and I was up late that night canning a gallon of sauce. On Wednesday in anticipation of cold weather, Miriam and I went out and stripped the tomato vines, all of it – red, orange, pink or green – and brought it all onto the back porch to ripen. Over the next few weeks we will turn it all into puree, sauce, or salsa. We also picked another batch of broccoli to blanch and freeze and we picked the last cauliflower of the year. I also trimmed all the onions and put them in storage. Stacey started processing our apples on Wednesday by canning five quarts of applesauce. I canned another four quarts on Thursday. I also made a batch of raspberry jelly.
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| All the tomatoes on the back porch. |
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| Onions ready for storage. |
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| The last cauliflower of the year. |
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| A week's worth of canning. |
On Saturday morning we went out to the farm of our friends Bob and Nancy Jones in Genesee. They heard that we didn’t have enough apples this year to make cider and vinegar and told us we could come and pick apples at their place. We picked ten buckets of Freedom apples and took them to our Amish friend Levi Borkholder, who pressed them into 15 gallons of cider for us. Five gallons of the cider went into the vinegar vat. It will be ready in February. We drank a gallon of fresh cider at dinner that night. It was delicious. The rest of it went into the freezer to refresh us during cold winter days. While we were at the Jones’s, we helped them pick their tomatoes ahead of the freeze. They sent us home with a bucket of Brandywine tomatoes that I immediately canned as seven quarts of tomato puree.
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| Hannah and Stacey picking apples. |
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| Stacey climbing for the high apples. |
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| Me getting the low apples. |
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| Hannah hauling them to the car. |
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| Picking tomatoes before the freeze. |
Last week there were reports of some strange animals roaming the area. They were seen up on Fox Hill and in Morley Hollow and near the Ulysses Cemetery. I heard several different descriptions of them – two odd beasts, huge and shaggy, one of them with bizarre twisted horns. Someone finally identified them as a breed of sheep called Jacobs Sheep. Some people have attempted to catch them, but without success so far. On Saturday morning as we were driving home from Borkholder’s we saw them, a ram and a ewe, walking along the road. I took pictures of them as we drove by.
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| The Jacobs Sheep we saw along the road. |
This is General Conference weekend. Yesterday we watched all the sessions at our house via the internet. Technology is such a blessing. Today we will go over to Shillig’s and watch the last two sessions there on BYU-TV. The sessions don’t start until noon for us, so that gives us a nice, leisurely Sabbath morning. I love General Conference. With the world in its present condition, it is comforting and inspiring to hear the word of the Lord through his apostles, prophets, and other church leaders.
Daniel reports from Italy that all is well with him. He loves it there. He loves it so much that he has decided to stay on longer until the end of November. He sent us pictures of pizza night at the restaurant and the oven they use to bake it in. I’m glad he’s having such a good experience.
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| The pizza oven. |
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| Pizza night in Monsampietro Morico. |
The week ahead will be busy here. I’m in school all week, so my afternoons will be very busy. Now that we’ve had a killing frost, I will clean out the flower beds and the vegetable garden. We will bring in the cabbages now that they’ve been frosted. Cabbage always tastes better after it has endured a frost. There will also be plenty of leaves to rake. And we will continue processing apples and tomatoes. I’ll probably make some elderberry jelly too. I like this kind of work. I like to look at the end of the day and see the evidence of all my efforts in the form of canned jars of food and tidy flower beds. October is a busy month. Winter is coming and we must prepare for it.
