We’ve come to the end of August already. We are at that point in the year when things seem to accelerate – as if summer wasn’t already moving fast enough. School has started and now old schedules must be obeyed again. September looms three days away. It is a busy month. Now the harvest will hasten as more and more crops ripen – just as other demands begin to encroach on my time. I love harvest time. Picking and processing the food I’ve been growing all through spring and summer is the pinnacle of the garden year. I feel the thrill of success when I see rows of canning jars full and ready to carry down cellar.
Josiah is home from school for two weeks and we have been busy. I made a list of projects to do while he is here and we tackled one almost every day last week. The projects involved doing things I can’t or won’t do such as climb trees. Some of them were jobs that just went better with two people working on them. I loved crossing items off the list as the week progressed.
On Tuesday we trimmed trees. The old maples on our property have a lot of dead limbs in them. During storms they often come down, but it’s best to bring them down under more controlled circumstances. Josiah loves to climb trees – even with a saw tied to his body. He cut down some pretty big branches and we hauled them away. One of the biggest maple trees has a low branch that is horizontal to the ground. It has been slowly sagging lower and lower and we were concerned that it would pull the whole tree over. Josiah and I braced it up with a beam. Josiah has also been working at Zito Media, but after he gets home each afternoon, we keep working on the list.
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| Josiah trimming trees. |
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| Hauling away the limbs. |
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| Bracing the old maple. |
These days we are busy almost every day picking and processing something from the garden. During the week, Miriam picked a big batch of basil. She froze that batch. When she picks again, she will dry it. While she works with it, the whole house is filled with the wonderful fragrance of it. She wants to try and dehydrate other things too – carrots and onions. We are in the middle of harvesting onions and carrots are ready now too. This week I will pick and pickle beets and blanch and freeze chard.
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| Processing basil |
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| Onions ready for storage. |
On Wednesday I began canning tomatoes. We had a bucketful of ripe tomatoes and I spent the morning chopping, boiling, and milling the tomatoes. Then I spent the rest of the day reducing it to sauce. Tomatoes are mostly water, so my five gallon bucket of tomatoes ended up making just two quarts of thick sauce. But tomato season has just begun and there will be lots more.
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| Processing tomatoes. |
While I was working in the kitchen, I wanted some music to listen to and, on a whim, I put on the Beach Boys’ Endless Summer album. The wave of nostalgia that hit me almost knocked me over. Endless Summer was released in the summer of 1974 when I was 16. We lived in Naperville, Illinois, at the time and I had never seen the Pacific Ocean let alone gone surfing (I still haven’t gone surfing and never will), but that music became an integral part of my teenage years from that moment on. I didn’t have a car of my own and our family car didn’t have a cassette player, but all my friends’ cars did and Endless Summer was almost always playing as we drove around. The movie American Graffiti had come out the year before and many of the Beach Boys songs were part of its soundtrack. That same year, 1974, Happy Days began its ten year run on television. That movie and TV show started a 50's nostalgia craze that colored most of my late teen years. We started having sock hops at church and school. We learned how to jitterbug. When I graduated from high school and got a job in 1976, I bought a stereo and two of my first (non-classical) album purchases were Endless Summer and American Graffiti. As I stirred tomatoes on Wednesday morning and that music played, I found myself missing friends I haven’t seen in over 45 years and I longed for a time that, at least as I perceived it, was simpler and full of youthful innocence (or maybe obliviousness is a better word).
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| Nostalgic albums. |
The mood of nostalgia lingered on through the week. The weather, perfect August heat and humidity, helped to fuel it. Wednesday was the first day of school and, although I haven’t been called in yet, hearing the school bus go up the road in the mornings stirred feelings of sweet sadness in me. It’s been five years since the school bus had to stop at our driveway and pick up Howe children. I find myself wishing sometimes that summer really was endless, but then the rational part of my brain reminds that this world I live in needs winter to exist and that my life would be diminished if I didn’t have spring and autumn to excite and dazzle me. Still, the passing of summer is always hard to face.
On Wednesday evening I picked cucumbers and peppers and brought in some onions and we started our second batch of pickle relish. This time, in keeping with tradition, Josiah ground it all up. When he was done, I salted the mash and let it sit overnight. Thursday morning I cooked it and canned it. This will be the last batch for the year. My cucumber vines have dried up early. In a good year we get four batches of relish, but this year, only two.
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| Peppers for relish. |
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| Josiah grinding relish. |
Thursday was a glorious day, a perfect late summer day with just the right amount of sunshine, heat, and humidity. After canning relish in the morning, I spent part of the day mowing the lawn. I did some weeding. I took a walk around the yard to photograph flowers. The dominant colors in the garden now are yellow and orange. That’s because the marigolds, helenium, split-leafed coneflowers, rudbeckia, and sunflowers are at their peak. I grew several different kinds of sunflowers this year. Some are short and some are tall. Some have the traditional floral structure, some are more exotic. I love them all. I cut the last of the gladioli and brought them in – the final bouquet of the season. They were beautiful this year. I’m sad that they are done now. That evening, Stacey and I dug up some potatoes. Our friend Nancy gave us some sweet corn and for dinner that night we had corn on the cob and new potatoes. Eating fresh from the garden is one of the greatest delights of summer. That evening, I picked another bucketful of tomatoes and on Friday morning I processed them into seven quarts of sauce.
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| Yellow marigolds. |
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| Orange marigolds. |
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| Helenium. |
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| Tall split-leaf coneflowers. |
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| Some of my sunflowers. |
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| The last bouquet of glads. |
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| Canning more tomatoes. |
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| A finished batch of tomato sauce. |
On Friday it was a little cooler. It had rained during the night and that had lessened the heat a bit. The day was overcast. I didn’t do much in the garden. I had sign orders I had to work on. Later in the day we had a thunderstorm and it poured rain. That evening we began a Harry Potter Movie Marathon. We do things like that from time to time. Between Christmas and New Years Day we do a Lord of the Rings Marathon. Around Valentines Day we have a Jane Austen Festival. Other random marathons take place from time to time – Dickens, Shakespeare, Hallmark (unfortunately). We’re an odd bunch. Our Harry Potter Marathon began in great style with the extended version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and as a treat, a replica of Harry’s birthday cake made of Rice Krispies Treats complete with pink frosting and misspelled words, and pumpkin juice.
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| Our first Harry Potter treat. |
Saturday morning was dreary. The sun didn’t make it through the clouds until around 11:00. That’s when Josiah and I started working on our Project of the Day. This time we tackled The Barn. It was a lengthy and complicated task involving shoveling out chicken manure and hauling it up to the compost pile, cleaning out nesting boxes, putting down new straw, scrubbing the waterers, and straightening the fence around the chicken yard. It was hard, hot, dirty work. The barn was full of big spiders. I consider them friends because they eat bugs, so as we cleaned we did our best to relocate them to other areas. As we finished up around 5:00, we heard thunder and it began to rain a little. That evening we watched Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets and had cupcakes as our treat. This week we will make our way through the rest of them.
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| Cleaning the lower part of the barn. |
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| All clean with new straw. |
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| Clean nesting boxes. |
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| One of the barn spiders. |
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| A pumpkin spider in the barn. |
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| Our second night's Harry Potter treat. |
We’re home from church now and waiting for lunch. There is a discussion underway as to what treat should be made to accompany the next movie. Josiah doesn’t have to go to work tomorrow and we are trying to decide what project we will undertake next. As August wanes, the feeling at our house is that we must “make hay while the sun shines.”
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| Late August sunset. |
Dan
