It’s October already. The year is rushing toward its end. Autumn is well underway and what lies beyond it begins to loom large in my mind. Most years I approach winter with a sense of dread. The long, dark, cold months take a toll on me physically and mentally. But this year I feel differently. This year’s garden was harder than usual on me. Some of it was successful, some of it was not, that’s not unusual. But all of it seemed too big, too much. There were too many things to keep on top of and it wore me out. I’m not complaining about the bounty we’ve been blessed with. The fruits and vegetables we ate and harvested, the flowers whose beauty we enjoyed, were wonderful. But I find myself saying, next year I will not do so much. I don’t need a hundred foot long row of dahlias. I don’t want to tend a hundred tomato plants or dig up four hundred pounds of potatoes. I’m ready to scale things back. The Fedco tree catalog came in the mail and I looked through it and said, “I’m not planting anymore fruit trees.” And from now on, the only new additions to my flock will be what my own hens can hatch. What I have is enough. I don’t need to outdo myself every year. Am I getting old? Yes, assuredly. We all are. That’s the nature of life and time. I can’t bend and crawl and squat for hours on end like I once could. I think if I do less next year, I’ll enjoy what things I can do more.
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| A sunrise last week. |
And as for winter, I look forward to letting the garden rest and I will rest as well. I’ll cope with the darkness and the cold as best I can with warm clothes, good heat, and distractions – books, music, movies, my indoor plants. I’m thinking of trying painting water colors as a new hobby. Of course, I’ll complain about the snow when it complicates things like doing the chores and traveling. But I’m more inclined now to not travel if the weather is bad. There’s nothing so important that I can’t just say “I’m not going out on the roads in snow or ice or sub-zero temperatures anymore.” Older? More cautious? I choose to think wiser.
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| On a walk at sunrise. |
Our harvest time is drawing to a close now. The last of the tomatoes went to the pigs on Monday. They’d become infested with fruit flies and were unusable. I was glad to be done with them. The only things left now are apples, pumpkins, and pigs. I will start processing pumpkins this week. I only process the small Winter Luxury pumpkins. The big ones are for carving later in the month. The little pumpkins fit very nicely in our Instant Pot. I will pressure cook them, let them cool, scoop out the seeds, puree the flesh, drain the excess liquid, and freeze or freeze dry the mash. It’s a long process and I have twelve pumpkins. I will do one or two a day until they are all gone.
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| Sunrise in the meadow. |
The apple harvest is not complicated, but it’s a lot of work. We’ve already processed the early varieties into sauce and pie filling. Now the main crop of late apples is ready to pick. We will save the nicest apples, like the Calville Blanc d’Hiver and Jonagold, to slice and freeze dry. The rest, mostly Golden Russet, Roxbury Russet, and King of Tompkins County, will be pressed for cider. The vinegar I started last week from the hail damaged apples is fermenting nicely in the vats in the downstairs bathtub. I check their progress every day. I like to watch the bubbles rise as the yeast converts the sugars in the cider into carbon dioxide and alcohol. I think it will be ready for part two of its fermentation next week.
We’re on the last month of raising these pigs. They are scheduled to go to the butchers on November 18th. I found a nice word for a butcher or a slaughterhouse – abbatoir. It comes from Latin through French and sounds much nicer than those other more brutal English words. So our pigs – I guess because they now weigh more that 120 pounds, they are technically hogs – are going to the abbatoir on November 18th. That’s where they will be transformed from pig or hog into pork. We do that a lot in English – use an Old English word, pig, for the animal, but a Latin based, usually French word, pork, for its meat. That’s why cow becomes beef, calf becomes veal, sheep becomes mutton, deer becomes venison, and snail becomes escargot. No one wants to eat cow or sheep for dinner. And why anyone would want to eat a snail, no matter what it’s called, is beyond me. I tried escargot when we were in France and I can tell you, it’s all about the garlic butter, not the chewy disgusting mollusk.
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| A sunrise last week. |
There are other big tasks still to do to get things ready for winter. The back porch and the woodshed need to have a thorough cleaning. We need to stack firewood on the back porch. The barn needs to be winterized. That involves cleaning the upper part and stockpiling feed, cleaning the lower part and putting in fresh straw, cleaning the feeders and waterers, and washing all the windows to let in as much light as possible during the dark days. I will eventually retire the rain barrel, set up the electric water heaters, and run an electric line down to the barn, but I will wait until things start to freeze before I do that. It won’t be long now.
Monday was a good day for working outdoors. It was overcast, but just the right temperature to be out in shirt sleeves all day. I spent most of the day working in my raised bed garden, getting it tidy and tucked in for the winter. I filled the beds with chopped leaves. I cleaned the paths between the beds. It looked good when I was done and I am done with that part of the garden now.
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| The raised bed garden ready for winter. |
Tuesday I moved on to another part of the garden, the flowerbed at the head of the driveway. It was looking pretty good until the hail storm knocked it all to pieces. There was some tall red amaranth growing there that was in tatters. I cut it all down. There were flowers that had been snapped off and smashed down. I pulled them up. I didn’t clean the bed out completely. There are things still growing there that I want to get seeds from yet. When frost comes, I will clear it completely.
Wednesday was rainy. It was that kind of rain that is more like very heavy, swirling mist. It seemed to condense on every surface, every leaf, every hair on my head, my jacket, my glasses. Then it either soaked in or dripped off. Walking to the barn and back for the morning chores, I was soaked through in a minute. But I didn’t mind the rain so much. I spent most of the morning running errands – two trips to the transfer station to dispose of rubbish, a trip to the carpenter’s shop to pick up a chair they repaired, a trip to the Amish feed store to buy hog food. After that, I had no need to go outside again until afternoon chore time. And how did I spend the rest of the day until then? Reading.
A few weeks ago, a friend at church gave me a book of English history, aptly titled History of England by W. E. Lunt (William Edward Lunt, 1882-1956). It was first published in 1928 and this copy is the third edition published in 1945 and was updated to include World War II. I love reading history and this book, rather than the disturbing revisionist stuff published more recently, is very straight forward. So far I’ve read through the prehistoric eras, the Celts, the Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman conquests, and I’ve started on the Plantagenets. I’ve enjoyed it so far. It has maps and genealogy charts for the royal houses, things that increase my enjoyment of a history book considerably. It was a good way to wile away a rainy afternoon.
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| Rainy day orchard. |
Thursday was a perfect October day. It started out brisk, 34° at dawn, but it was sunny and the day warmed into the 70s. As I went down to do the morning chores, I heard one of my favorite autumn sounds, the distant calling of a flock of wild geese flying high overhead, headed south. It is an exciting and a sad sound. I spent the morning and afternoon working on apples. My biggest and oldest tree, the King of Tompkins County, is dropping its fruit fast. It is one of two old apple trees still standing from before we moved here, a remnant of an orchard that stood here in the 1920s. I think it is about a hundred years old. It is my latest ripening tree and the main source of our cider. First I raked up the fallen apples and set them aside to feed to the pigs. Then I began picking fruit from the tree to set aside for cider. It was lovely working in the sunshine with the smell of apples all around me.
After two years with no apples on our trees, we were thrilled to have fruit on every tree old enough to bear fruit this year. I anticipated a huge crop. But nature had other plans. Perhaps I was too boastful of my expected bounty and needed to be put in my place. The hailstorm on September 21st knocked down half the fruit, some of which I was able to salvage for vinegar. Half the fruit still on the trees was damaged with gouges and bruises. Then the ants, wasps, hornets, bees, and sapsuckers moved in to feed on both the fruit on the ground and the damaged fruit on the trees. So after a day of picking what good fruit I could find, I estimate we only got about a fourth of what we should have. But that’s better than nothing. We’ll have enough to press some cider.
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| Working in the orchard. |
As I was working in the orchard I heard another of my favorite autumn sounds, the fall song of the Spring Peeper (Pseudacris crucifer). In the spring the peepers sing in the evenings at high volume, hundreds of them in the ponds around here. Hearing them for the first time in the spring is a Big Event at our house. They sing in the autumn too, but not a mighty chorus of them. I usually hear just one or two peeping from somewhere in the trees nearby. It sounds like a farewell song, sweet and sad, as if they are saying, “Good-bye, see you in the spring.”
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| A singing spring peeper. |
I went out before dawn on Friday to see if I could see comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS C/2023 A3. It was supposed to be visible 45 minutes before sunrise, which was at 7:12, so I went out at 6:15 and made my way out to the big garden where the view of the eastern horizon is unobstructed by trees. The sky overhead was bright with stars. I stood there in the dew drenched grass bundled up and wearing my barn boots and my fleece lined hoodie. It was a chilly 40°. I was wary of encountering a skunk. One has been visiting our yard every night, tearing up the lawn in search of grubs. I could smell that it was nearby and I saw a trail through the dewy grass that marked its recent passage, but we managed to avoid each other. I stood there for a while identifying constellations. I could see the Milky Way. Orion, the Pleiades, and Jupiter sparkled above me. But I saw no sign of the comet. As sunrise approached, clouds moved in and began to faintly glow red. I gave up looking and quickly took some photos with a long exposure thinking that I never saw the comet. Later, when I loaded the photos onto my computer, there was the comet! So I didn’t see it with my naked eye, but my camera captured it. It is supposed to be visible again after October 12th, but at sunset in the west. I’ll try again then.
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| The comet is in the center. |
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| When to watch for the comet next. |
Friday was another perfect October day. It was sunny and warm, 75°! which is great for October. I took advantage of the warmth to power wash the house. That’s a job Hannah likes to do, but it looked like this was the last warm day and she was at work, so I did it. I didn’t do as good a job as she does. I’m only willing to go up the ladder three rungs, so the second story doesn’t get very clean. The parts I did reach looked nice when I was done. I got soaked in the process.
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| Power washing the house. |
This weekend is General Conference. As always, I’ve been looking forward to it. Even more so this time. With the world in the state it's in, I need to hear what prophets, apostles, and other church leaders have to say. We watched three sessions yesterday. The messages have been wonderful, admonitions to increase our faith, turn to Christ, be peacemakers – voices of kindness and reason in a world full of division and conflict.
In between sessions yesterday, we picked apples. We’ve stripped all of the trees now except the big one. Miriam, Kurt, and I will work on that during the day tomorrow. We are planning to go to the cider mill tomorrow evening.
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| Picking apples between Conference sessions. |
With our first General Conference session not starting until noon today, our Sabbath morning was leisurely. Everyone, including me, slept in a little. I went out at 7:00 to do the morning chores and take a walk. It was 31° and there was frost. I took a video of parts of my walk. It was so quiet. I could hear wood ducks whistling in the beaver pond and crows making a fuss somewhere above the house. I went out to the pigpen. They were sleeping in too. I came back to the house and sat down at the computer to do my morning sudoku when Stacey said, “What’s that noise?” There was a strange screeching sound out front. I went out on the porch and was blasted by the smell of skunk. There were two skunks fighting right by the front porch stairs. I grabbed my phone and filmed them. The stench is still hanging over the house. So we had some unexpected and unwelcome drama on an otherwise peaceful Sabbath morning.
In a few hours we will watch the last two sessions of General Conference. I’m excited to see what new temples will be announced. I always feel uplifted and fortified after General Conference, filled with new resolve to try harder and do better. The world may be raging with all the dire things foretold in scripture, but I know that Christ will return, righteousness will triumph over evil, and the world will be at peace for a thousand years. And that gives me strength and hope, come what may.
