The week was full of shifts, fluctuations between the seasons, autumn trying to advance, summer struggling to push back. All week long, every day, the weather wandered back and forth. In the mornings it was cold enough for me to wear my fleece-lined hoodie, long sleeved shirt, and long pants. By noon it was warm enough that I came in and changed into shorts and a short sleeved shirt. Toward evening it cooled off and I was back to warm clothing again. We went from fall to summer and back to fall in just a few hours. I don't mind switching clothes back and forth. I'm thankful that it still gets warm enough to do it. Soon it will be just the warm clothes and then the even warmer clothes. I know who is winning the struggle.
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| The season shifts. |
I think you know that I love gardening. It's what I mostly write about. Probably because it's what I mostly think about. I love every aspect of it – the planning, the planting, the tending, the flowering, the fruiting, seedtime, and harvest. Oddly, one of the things I enjoy most about gardening is ripping it all out at the end of the growing season. For all my griping about early frosts, I inevitably reach the point where I hope for a hard killing frost so I can commence with the cleanup. Death, destruction, and decomposition are as much a part of gardening as sowing, growing, and harvesting. It's all part of the ever-turning cycle of the seasons.
Last Sunday evening, they issued a frost advisory. At this point, the only thing out in the garden worth the effort of protecting are the tomatoes, peppers, and basil. We covered them and left everything else to the mercy of the cold. We cut bouquets of sunflowers, gladiolus, cosmos, and other flowers that probably would not survive the night. I brought all the potted plants on the back porch steps onto the porch and closed them in. I checked the weather before I went to bed. The sky was clear, it was 40°, and dropping.
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| Frost bouquets. |
We went down to 32° that night. There was a beautiful, bright full moon. According to the moon naming tradition, the full moon in September is called either the Corn Moon or the Harvest Moon. Technically, the full moon closest to the Autumnal Equinox is designated as the Harvest Moon, and that usually happens in September, but this year it happens to be in October. The Equinox is on September 22nd and the full moon on October 6th is a day closer to it than the full moon on September 7th. So that night, I looked out into the darkness at the full Corn Moon* shining brightly in the cold, cold night. That sounds very poetic. I just made that up.
I didn't feel so poetic when I had to bundle up to go out to do the morning chores. There was frost on the lawn. I wore my barn coat, but refused to wear gloves. I told myself that I don't wear gloves in September. So my hands were very cold when I came back in the house. I had to turn on the electric heater by my desk to warm them. When it had warmed up a little outside, I went out to uncover the things we had covered and inspect for frost damage. I didn't put the covers away. I knew I'd need them again.
[*The Blue Corn Moon in the song Colors of the Wind from Disney's Pocahontas is not a real thing. Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the song, made it up because he liked the sound of it. He said he was inspired by the Native American Green Corn Moon, which happens in August, and then changed green to blue to evoke the idea of blue corn tortillas.]
I had errands to run that morning – a trip to the feed store for chicken and pig food, a trip to the hardware store for drywall primer, paint rollers, and brushes. When I got back, I began my attack on the garden. I started with the weed-whacker trimming down all the bulky stuff. Then I moved on to my hand sickle doing closer work that required more finesse. After that, I began preparing to dig out clumps of plants that have overgrown their boundaries – phlox, silk grass, and the inappropriately named obedient plant.
We had another frost warning Monday evening so I was glad I hadn't put the covers away. Stacey and I went out before sunset and covered the tomatoes, peppers, and basil again. The temperature dropped to 32° again that night and we had a light frost Tuesday morning. As soon as the frost was gone, I mowed. Now that I'm mowing the orchard, it takes longer, about an hour and a half instead of forty-five minutes. Soon the grass will stop growing. Then I'll switch from mowing grass to mowing leaves. The joys of autumn.
Because of my restrictive diet, I'm not supposed to eat sugary food and that includes most fruit. No peaches, plums, cherries, pears, pineapple, bananas, oranges – you know, the most desirable ones. I can have berries – strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries – and I appreciate that. Apples are also on the bad list because of their high carbohydrate and fructose content. But I live in an apple orchard. During most of the year my life is focused on apples, when they bloom, set fruit, need thinning, controlling the pests that plague them, harvesting, and processing them. I love apples. So I tend to ignore the restriction placed on them. They are the one fruit on the bad list I indulge in, and then only when they are in season. They are in season now. I go out every day and sample them to see if they are ripe. Usually I select one that looks good and take a bite, chew it thoughtfully, assess its ripeness. If it isn't ready, I spit it out and toss the apple for the deer to eat. If it is ripe, I eat it. I have thirty-four apple trees. Luckily they don't all ripen at the same time. That would be too much for me.
Some of the trees are already done, the early varieties – Yellow Transparent, Duchess of Oldenburg, Sops-In-Wine. Some won't be ripe until later this month and into October – Roxbury Russet, Winter Banana, Calville Blanc d'Hiver, King of Tompkins County, Golden Russet, Oxford Black, Winesap. Some are ready now – Jonagold, Honeycrisp, Wealthy, and Chestnut Crab. Of all the apples in my orchard, Chestnut Crab apples are my favorite. They are small and not very pretty with a sort of blushed peachy slightly russeted skin. But they are crisp, juicy, sweet, and delicious. I can't resist them. While they're ripe I find myself visiting the tree throughout the day to eat a few of them. Their time is short. If they aren't eaten, they will drop and they are much too good for deer.
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| My Jonagold tree. |
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| My favorite Chestnut Crab apple tree. |
We barely escaped frost on Wednesday morning. We went down to 34°. I'm glad for that 2° that kept us above freezing because I didn't cover anything. I'm tired of worrying about frost at this point and am considering picking all the tomatoes to ripen on the porch and just letting things freeze. I've ripened green tomatoes on the back porch every year we've lived here. That's how we garden here.
A hatchery near here announced they were doing a Rooster Drop Off. They were willing to take any roosters brought to them and take them to an auction up in New York state. I had two too many roosters, so Tuesday night, while the roosters were roosting, I nabbed them and put them in a cage and on Wednesday morning I delivered them to the hatchery lady. Now I only have one rooster and that makes for a much calmer flock. The rooster I have now is young. He's a Black Austrolorp and very pretty. The hens seem to have adjusted to the power shift.
Wednesday was a beautiful day. I worked in the orchard all afternoon. There isn't a lot that needs to be done with the trees at this time of year. I didn't do anything to the trees that still have fruit on them. The one I worked on most was the old Yellow Transparent tree. It's one of the two trees that were here when we moved here. It, and the King of Tompkins County tree beside it, are all that remains of the orchard that was here back in the 1920s. Aunts Esther and Eleanor once told about that orchard. It was here when they were girls and lived in the house next door. That orchard was destroyed in an ice storm in the late 1920s. So these two trees must be about a hundred years old. They weren't properly pruned for a very long time and in the twenty-five years I've cared for them, I still haven't been able to restore them to a proper shape. I try to be as gentle as I can because of their great age, but sometimes larger catastrophes happen, like last year when we broke a huge branch off the Tompkins tree while shaking down apples with the tractor. Mostly my care for them is pruning out dead branches and water sprouts. That's what I did with the Yellow Transparent tree that day. There were a lot of dead branches.
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| The aftermath of pruning. |
Yellow Transparent apple is an old heirloom variety. It originated in the Baltic region around Latvia in the 1850s and was brought to the United States in the 1870s. It was once a popular variety, but it isn't widely planted anymore. Its fruit ripens very early in August and sometimes even July and it doesn't keep well. It bruises easily. It has pale yellow skin and soft, rather mealy flesh and it makes the best applesauce of all my trees.
When I went down to do the afternoon chores, as I was collecting eggs, I heard a happy noise from the nesting box with the broody hen in it. She had been sitting on guinea eggs for several weeks. I estimated the eggs would hatch around the 10th to the 12th and I was right. There was a tiny keet peeping. Unfortunately, there were two hens in the box. Both seemed to want to be on the hatching eggs and I couldn't tell which one was the right one. I didn't want to disturb them for fear of hurting any babies, so I just let them be. I went down again in the evening and there were now two keets and still two hens in the box. I took out the empty egg shells and left them to settle in for the night.
Thursday morning I went down first thing to check on the guinea keets. There were still two keets and two hens and they were still up in the nesting box. With the strange dual mother situation, I didn't know what would happen. When I went down in the afternoon, there was only one mother hen in the nest with the two keets and there were five unhatched eggs that smelled pretty bad. I took the eggs out of the nest and disposed of them. Then I took the hen and keets and moved them down to the coop floor. I threw a bit of feed on the ground near them and the hen began teaching them to eat right away. It was so cute watching them. I was concerned because I saw a rat the night before when I went down to close the barn. A rat would make a quick meal of those tiny keets.
As I always do, Thursday morning, when I'd finished the chores, I checked the news. It was grim. We were still feeling shock and profound sadness over the assassination of Charlie Kirk. There were all the reminders of the 9/11 terrorist attack – 2,996 people killed. There were reports from across the planet of political unrest, riots, scandals, corruption, governments collapsing, angry people full of hate doing violent things. I found myself wallowing in it as I sat and read the reports. It was dark. It made me feel dark. Outside, it was a beautiful day, sunny and serene. I had to turn from the darkness and go out into my small part of the world where there was light and peace. You might consider that escapist. I was not in denial that all of that turmoil was going on or that it would not affect me and those I love. I just chose to look away for a while and immerse myself in the smaller problems I face and the little joys I cherish. I found a little serenity in working in the soil, getting my hands dirty, working up a sweat, feeling the sun on my skin and a breeze in my hair, and the taste of an apple in my mouth. I thought of our General Conference just a few weeks away and felt a sense of heightened anticipation for the messages I will hear that will help to strengthen my hope and faith that in the end, Christ will return, righteousness will triumph, and the earth will have peace.
Then I went out to work with the pigs and some of that serenity evaporated. The pigs are getting big. Their appetites are enormous. They have been testing the strength of the fence around their pen. They rub against it and push on it. One day last week I found that they had pushed one of the panels hard enough to break the fasteners that held it to its post. The panel had shifted and there was a three foot gap. The pigs hadn't discovered the gap yet and I quickly closed it and refastened it. Had they gotten out, we would never be able to catch them. So I spent an hour reinforcing the fence. The whole time I was working, the pigs were there interfering. They tried to nibble on my fingers and the fasteners I was using. They grunted and squealed for food. They have a feeder that is always full of food and we'd dumped buckets of fallen apples in their trough the day before that were still uneaten, but they prefer the slop I feed them every evening and feel like they should get a bucketful every time they see me. I gave them a treat of some cracked corn mash to try and distract them away from me. They flipped the trough over and dumped it on the ground without even tasting it and then resumed squealing at me. They are quite obnoxious. November is coming.
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| Unwanted attention. |
Thursday night I went down before bed to check on things in the barn one last time. I wanted to see how the hen with her two keets were doing. When I'd checked earlier, they had settled into the straw in a corner of the coop. Now when I checked, I found the hen was back up in a nesting box and there were no keets. I looked everywhere for them. No keets. I had my .22 with me in case I saw the rat and I did see it when I went into the coop. It scurried into a hole along one wall before I could shoot it. I assume it got the keets. It made me feel sad and sick. They were so cute and their tiny lives were so short. I learned a sad lesson. I can't count on stupid chickens to hatch and raise guinea keets. At least not the way I did it this time. I've now declared all out war on the rats. It begins tomorrow. They will rue the day they invaded my barn.
Friday morning was a fine fall morning even though it isn't technically fall yet. I took my morning walk down to the beaver pond. There was low fog and a soft sunrise. There were ducks on the pond and two beavers swimming about. It was quiet. I like quiet mornings.
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| Quiet Friday morning. |
We left on Friday afternoon to spend the weekend with the Thayns. The Fosters did not go. They stayed and took care of things at home for me, fed the chickens and the pigs, collected the eggs, minded the garden. We had a busy weekend. On Friday night we went to the drive-in movie to see Toy Story.
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| At the drive-in movie. |
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| At the drive-in movie. |
On Saturday we were going to go to the Highland Festival in Ligonier, but decided we'd rather go to the zoo. Neither Stacey nor I had been to the Pittsburgh Zoo before. Rachel has a season pass and had some guest passes to use. We spent about four hours there. It's a pretty nice zoo.
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| First time at the Pittsburgh Zoo. |
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| Riding the escalator up. |
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| At the elephants. |
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| Watching the penguins swim. |
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| A little rest after a lot of walking. |
After the zoo, we went back to the Thayn's and spent the rest of the day just hanging out. Tabor, who had been away on a business trip, arrived home later that night.
This morning we went to church. After church we had lunch. Then we had a quick and early celebration of Hazel's birthday. Then we started for home. Four hours later, here we are.
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| Hazel opening early birthday presents. |
I'm glad Sarah was here to take care of the chickens and pigs. I took a quick walk around the property and everything looks good, very dry, but good. Tomorrow I will have to water. There is no rain expected this week, but also no frost. I'll continue working on cleaning out the garden, harvesting, mowing up leaves, and enjoying the last days of summer.
