 |
| Foggy autumn morning. |
The weather last week was beautiful. Autumn is a picture perfect season here. But I can feel the cold weather settling in. No matter how warm the days get, the nights are cold. With frost coming almost every morning, the garden is collapsing rapidly. The tender plants disappeared long ago and the hardier ones are finally admitting defeat. Scarlet peony leaves, rugosa roses with red hips and yellow leaves, and a scattering of calendulas with a few scraggily yellow flowers are the last hangers on. The maple trees are falling into their long sleep, shedding colored leaves that seem to turn brown and crisp as soon as they touch the ground. Bare branches make the sun seem to shine brighter, but there isn’t much heat in it.
 |
| Frosted roses. |
 |
| Frosted sunflower. |
 |
| Frosted peony leaves. |
I’m at that point in my gardening year where all I want to do is to clear away the debris and tidy things up to get ready for winter. I still have to plant garlic and spring bulbs, the last constructive activities of the year. The rest of my work is destructive – digging up, pulling up, throwing out. Last week we dug up the potatoes and put them down cellar. We took down the tomato fence, the bean poles, and the cucumber trellis and stowed them all away. This week I will dig up the dahlias and put their tubers in feed sacks full of peat moss. The gladiolus corms are drying out a bit and then will go the same way. They’ll spend the winter down cellar, too.
 |
| Newly dug potatoes. |
We used our wood stove almost every day last week trying to keep the chill out of the house. Most days we light the stove around dinnertime and keep it going until bedtime, but some mornings it was cold enough that Josiah got up early and lit a fire before school. Having a fire in the stove makes the house seem cozier. It’s soothing to have a fire burning. The wood we got this year is mostly cherry. It’s scrap wood we buy from an Amish lumber mill and this year they happened to have mostly cherry. It’s a hard wood and it burns long and hot and smells good. When I go outside and catch a whiff of cherry smoke on the air it smells so good. We feel blessed to have a good supply of wood this year.
I harvested my flint corn last week. My yield was light because the center of my corn patch got knocked down early in the summer. I only grow flint corn, which we grind for corn flour. The variety I grew this year is called Abenaki Calais Flint. It’s a pretty corn. Some ears are yellow, some are red. It grinds into a soft flour that smells and tastes cornier (in the true sense of the word, not goofy) than commercial corn flours.
 |
| Flint corn. |
 |
| Flint corn closeup. |
The official color forecast for the fall leaves in our part of the world says the glory will peak starting this week – October 1st through the 10th. That’s seems pretty accurate. We plan to take a drive midweek to take pictures. In Japan the season of autumn leaves is as celebrated as the sakura cherry blossom season. It is called koyo, which means “red leaves.” People go on koyo excursions, visiting places famous for their spectacular leaves. When I was in Japan we went on an excursion one p-day to a famous koyo site near Kyoto called Takao. We walked along paths that gave amazing views of the mountains and the bright leaves. We ate at a little restaurant overlooking a picturesque stream and tasted a seasonal delicacy, maple leaf tempura. It was very beautiful there. Here in Potter County, we have vistas to rival any I saw in Japan. If you are coming to visit us, this is the best time to do it.
We did some canning last week. I canned a batch of salsa on Tuesday morning. On Wednesday evening Stacey and I were home by ourselves while the children were at play practice at school and we spent the evening canning apple pie filling and a batch of grape jelly. On Saturday we canned tomato sauce. I love canning food. I love setting the jars out on the counter to cool and hearing the dome lids pop. I love taking the jars down cellar and lining them up on the shelves.
Saturday morning our neighbor Carol Goodenough stopped by to tell us there some big birds dead in the road down by our barn and she thought they were turkeys. We went down and, sure enough, two of the young turkeys had escaped their pen and gone into the road where a car hit them. I was sad to see it, and to have to clean up the mess. That leaves only twelve of the sixteen turkeys we hatched this year. They are getting big now and will be ready to butcher in early November.
Today is yet another perfect autumn day. On the way home from church we took the back roads through Ellisburg and over Cobb Hill to Gold. I had the camera with me and tried to capture the beauty of the trees, but photographs aren’t adequate. And the best color is yet to come.
 |
| On the way home from church. |
 |
| On the way home from church. |
 |
| On the way home from church. |
 |
| On the way home from church. |
 |
| On the way home from church. |
 |
| On the way home from church. |
This was Fast Sunday for us because of General Conference next weekend. Dinner preparations are underway in the kitchen and the smell is making me crazy. We’re having our Standard Fast Sunday Menu – oatmeal burgers, home fried potatoes (just dug up yesterday), and a frozen peach smoothie. They’re calling me to the table – I’m on my way!
Good Sabbath.
 |
| Making our Sabbath dinner. |
