Harvest

It's harvest time.

Theresa, from Pondering the Myriad Things, had a hard frost the other day ... and we got one last night, too. Of course, I thought about covering the plants ... I even went so far as to put the support hoops in place ... and then before bed, I forgot. Today the pumpkins look very sorrowful, and the tomatoes look a bit weary, but they seem to be okay. We have a tarp over the main tomato bed and blankets on the potatoes and pumpkins.

One of the people I work with has an apple tree in the yard, and she brought me two huge bags of picked apples and four bags of windfall apples on Friday! I have spent the weekend processing apples ... we have juice (litres and litres of it), dried apples, fruit leather, and we ate delicious apple dumplings on Saturday afternoon. I still have most of a bag of the 'good' apples to work through ... and this is after feeding half a bag of the windfalls to the sheep! Some of the juice is in large buckets on the kitchen floor fermenting into cider - it's an experiment, so we'll see what it does.

Needless to say, we are exhausted. It's been a busy long weekend here - I processed apples from the time I got up on Saturday until after 9 pm, and we have also been trying to sort through the things in the basement, clear up the outside, and get the fibre room into useable condition. It's a huge job - but you can't make good use of your stores if they are disorganized, and we have more stuff than we need, so we are winnowing out the excess while we are at it.

More details in the Independence Day Update ... coming up next!