Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September when grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September when you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember without the hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember the fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December our hearts should remember and follow.
I remember hearing Ed Ames sing that song on the radio back in the mid 60's when I was a child and it was a hit. It is September now. The days have turned cooler, the nights are often chilly. The green and growing world is yellowing and the garden is slowing to its end. This month will be the last busy month for the garden as I finish the harvest, clean it all out, and start preparing for next year. There might still be a few warm days ahead – that happens sometimes in September – but the trend will be toward cold as the days grow darker. The equinox is only two weeks away. Deep in December I will be remembering these last lovely days of summer.
September arrived with rain. After a very dry summer, it was wonderful to have rain fall almost every day for most of the week. Sometimes it drizzled, sometimes it poured. Wednesday was especially nice with a warm heavy rain off and on all day and into the night. It rained hard enough to slake the thirsty ground and make puddles with the excess. The lawn is reviving. I will have to start mowing again. I’m always impressed with the necessity of water for life to flourish. I’ve lived in places where it was dry for most of the year. I’ve visited the deserts of the Southwest. Water is life. Rain is a blessing.
I had occasion to take a drive up over Cobb Hill and on toward Andrews Settlement last week. I haven’t been up that way in a long time. I’d forgotten how beautiful it is along those back roads. As the trees begin to change, I will be sure to take another drive up that way.
Try to remember the kind of September when grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September when you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember without the hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember the fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December our hearts should remember and follow.
I remember hearing Ed Ames sing that song on the radio back in the mid 60's when I was a child and it was a hit. It is September now. The days have turned cooler, the nights are often chilly. The green and growing world is yellowing and the garden is slowing to its end. This month will be the last busy month for the garden as I finish the harvest, clean it all out, and start preparing for next year. There might still be a few warm days ahead – that happens sometimes in September – but the trend will be toward cold as the days grow darker. The equinox is only two weeks away. Deep in December I will be remembering these last lovely days of summer.
September arrived with rain. After a very dry summer, it was wonderful to have rain fall almost every day for most of the week. Sometimes it drizzled, sometimes it poured. Wednesday was especially nice with a warm heavy rain off and on all day and into the night. It rained hard enough to slake the thirsty ground and make puddles with the excess. The lawn is reviving. I will have to start mowing again. I’m always impressed with the necessity of water for life to flourish. I’ve lived in places where it was dry for most of the year. I’ve visited the deserts of the Southwest. Water is life. Rain is a blessing.
I had occasion to take a drive up over Cobb Hill and on toward Andrews Settlement last week. I haven’t been up that way in a long time. I’d forgotten how beautiful it is along those back roads. As the trees begin to change, I will be sure to take another drive up that way.
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| On my drive near Andrews Settlement. |
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| Coming back toward Cobb Hill. |
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| Over Cobb Hill. |
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| Coming down the Rapley Road almost home. |
The goldenrod and asters are glorious right now. All along the roadsides and in the unmowed fields the goldenrod glows. Asters, it seems, are not as plentiful as they used to be. I think that is partly due to PennDot and the township mowing the verges of the roads late in the summer. If they mow early, the asters have time to recover, but not when they mow too late. I wish they would not mow at all.
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| Goldenrod and asters down at the barn. |
In the flower garden the sedums are blooming. They start out pink and as they age they slowly turn a rusty red and then chestnut brown. My original sedum plant came from my Aunt Esther Rathfon years ago. I have since divided it into several plants that grace different parts of the garden.
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| Sedum and rudbeckia. |
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| Sedum and coneflowers. |
All summer long I have looked for monarch butterfly caterpillars in my yard. I grow patches of milkweed just for them. I did not find any until last week and they were not on any of the wild milkweed, but on the butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) in the long border. Butterfly weed has vivid orange flowers and is in the milkweed family. Apparently the monarchs prefer it over the wild sort.
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| Monarch caterpillars at last! |
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| No caterpillars in the milkweed patch, but big spiders! |
I planted heavenly blue morning glories in two places this year – on a trellis in one of the flower beds, and in a pot on the back porch steps. They have grown into very lush vines, but they haven’t produced a single flower. There aren’t even any buds developing. I don’t know what happened, but I’m very disappointed. The only morning glories that bloomed this year are on a scraggly vine that popped up on its own in a patch of dead cornflowers. I hope next year will be better. I love heavenly blue morning glories.
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| Flowerless morning glories in the garden (the flowers are petunias). |
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| Flowerless vines on the back porch. |
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| Scraggly morning glory in the cornflowers. |
Down at the barn, the young chickens decided to use their young strong wings to fly out of the chicken yard whenever they pleased to wander the yard. They especially like to go along the side of the road and scratch in the weeds. More often than not, they end up in the road and we couldn’t allow that, so on Thursday after they’d all gone to roost, Josiah and I went into the coop and clipped their wings. While we were there, we sequestered all the extra roosters in the middle pen of the coop. At first I thought only seven of this year’s thirty-three chicks were male, which was a good ratio. It turns out that it was more like nineteen out of thirty-three and that’s not such a good ratio. On Friday evening Stacey butchered six of them. She did five more on Saturday. She sings to them while she works to try and keep them calm. The song she sang this time was “Sweet Molly Malone.” I don’t know why. Now the butchering is done and the only rooster left is our very pretty, pure white Araucana. I don’t think he has realized yet that he is the only rooster. Things will be a lot less raucous down in the barn now that there’s just one.
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| Stacey singing as she butchers. |
On Monday work proceeded on two of our Big Projects. As usual, our neighbor Ziggy Dunn came through with the tools and the know-how to get the jobs done. Once an old friend of mine, Cleon Spencer, told me that “A man without the proper tool is nothing but a working fool.” We are severely tool impaired at our house. That’s why we love it when Ziggy comes to the rescue. Last fall he cut down all our pine trees for us. Earlier this summer, he dug our pond for us. He came again with the proper tools on Monday. The first project we tackled was our driveway expansion. We are enlarging the driveway so that four cars can park there. Ziggy came by after school on Monday to help us put up a section of split-rail fence to demarcate the end of the driveway. He brought an auger and post hole digger and made short work of that with help from Josiah. He told us what kind and how much gravel we’ll need to cover the area. When he finished that, we had him look at our ongoing front porch project. In order to accommodate the new porch, we needed to take off the bottom step and the top layer of the existing porch. It is all concrete and we’d been making slow progress breaking it up. Ziggy went home and came back in a few minutes with a jackhammer. He showed Josiah how to work it and Josiah took over from there. By Saturday, the appropriate parts of the porch were demolished and will soon be hauled away. We’re not sure when the next phase of that project, building the new porch, will take place. Until then, we’re only using the back door.
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| The new fence. |
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| Josiah jack-hammering. |
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| The demolished porch. |
Tosh was here all week doing some work for the Rigases. It’s always nice to have him here. He left to go home at 4:00 on Saturday morning. I looked at the thermometer as he was driving away in the dark. It was 37°. It warmed up a bit after the sun came up, but it was a cool day, only in the 60's. But it was a sunny day and it was Saturday, and we got a lot of work done. Josiah and I tilled up the part of the garden where the cucumbers were. Then I planted wheat there. I’ve never grown wheat before. It isn’t a big patch. This is just a trial run to see if I can do it. I picked another batch of tomatoes and Stacey turned them into sauce. We’re starting to get autumn raspberries now and I picked a small batch of them and put them in the freezer.
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| Autumn raspberries. |
Tomorrow is Labor Day and there is no school. After being in school all week last week, I’m looking forward to a break. I have plans for the day, of course. I never let nice days slide by this late in the year. On Wednesday Josiah will leave to go back to school. We will miss him a lot. He helped me get so much done while he was here. And he brings a lot of fun and energy to our home. We won’t see him again until Christmas and I don’t want to think about that.
