Garden of Summer-past

Goodbye garden. Hello garden-blogging fail.



I'm equal parts thrilled and cringing that October is almost here.

This is my very favorite time of year. Running through crunchy leaves, sipping spiced cider, listening to my chickens sing as they scratch up the last of Summer's bugs, tidying up the garden in perfect hazy afternoon light, hearing combines chewing through the fields surrounding us, constantly sampling bits of whatever is going on or coming off our overworked dehydrator, tripping over the produce that spills out of our entryway and into our home... The whole season is one great big sensory experience, and I love it.

Cringing because, well, these glorious weeks are so fleeting.

And here it is, yes, almost October.


{not snow - cattail seeds}

And I have failed to blog about... anything and everything. But the garden? I barely mentioned it three times. That makes me cringe too. Seedlings in eggshells, harvesting peas, and voluptuous eggplants. That was it.

I did the writing in my head.

Here are handful of abbreviated posts that never made it to press:

1. I neglected far too much of our garden the previous year. The perfect solution to that is obviously to add another fifty square feet and five NDSU home garden variety trials. The observing, learning, comparing, tasting, and ownership the kids had of their trials was a beautiful thing. I wholeheartedly recommend this program to my North Dakota friends!

2. Our pole bean tee-pee was magnificent. I've never grown pole beans before. I underestimated them. It was shocking how the tee-pee went from bare to covered to unrecognizable (in a matter of fourteen days) as the beans went beyond crazy. The cats loved that thing, far too much. They even left offerings exactly in the middle of it. So weird.





3. The younger boy planted sixteen watermelon plants. See variety trials above. See oppressed overworked dehydrator above.



4. Apples! Finally these trees produced enough to justify using the word harvest. And harvest we did. We waited four and a half years for this.


{maybe that one had a bug?}

5. I cannot imagine fall without winter squash. A whole long shelf full. Every one of my seeds rotted in the ground this Spring, and I was irrationally upset about it. Yeah, I know I can get winter squash at the grocery store or the Farmer's Market. It just isn't the same. Then I found a volunteer something among the sunflowers that looked suspiciously gourd-like. Sweet happy day when I realized it was, in fact, winter squash. God does answer insignificant little prayers.

With the wind

Our house shook as the warm wind blew nonstop. Five days, or was it four? Gusting to fifty-five miles an hour.

On these October days, it seemed cruel to keep the kids inside when it was summer-day hot outside. Out our windows, the air swirled thick with what looked like snow. Cattail seeds. The wind drove the unending swarm of them through our yard. Each time I stepped out to collect eggs, or capture runaway sections of duct-work (we're in the midst of a furnace project), or rescue our young apple trees from the protective fences they had become hopelessly tangled in, or chase after whatever else was escaping our yard... the cattail seeds got me. That and the dust from combines busy miles and miles around, they got me. I came back in the house with a scratchy throat, watery eyes, and sneezes that made my little girl giggle.

That last day of brutal wind, the cattail seeds had all blown away. Far away. To Canada, I suppose. And it wasn't quite as dusty. So we ventured out.



The popcorn maze had taken a real beating.

The boys gathered what they could.

Whether it's mature enough to actually pop, we have yet to discover.



If not, the chickens will eat it.

The act of gathering it up, the running back and forth in the warm windy afternoon sunshine after five (or was it four?) days cooped up in the house... Well, it was perfect.





21. Wearing shorts in almost-mid-October in North Dakota, when a cloud of cattail seeds could easily have been snow.
22. My husband taking charge of the little girl so I could just hang with my boys.
23. Exploring every square inch of the tree that crashed down in our backyard.
24. The boys' joy upon discovering a Wood Duck's old nest high in a hole on that tree.
25. Our wonder at the hidden life that quietly surrounds us.
26. Imagining fuzzy ducklings jumping from that nest all the way to the ground, in our backyard, just like they do on our Planet Earth movie.
27. Ripening sunflowers that (mostly) stood despite the pounding wind.
28. A pile of popcorn cobs that one way or another, will not go to waste.
29. Autumn sunshine.
30. Forgetting for a few hours that I had piles of laundry to be folded and spelling words to help the first grader learn and dinner to be made, and instead just completely soaking up that beautiful gusty afternoon with my boys.



First photo for Live Every Moment - Autumn

That light in black and white

Scavenger Hunt at Ashley's!

1. Inspired by a Book or Movie

Grandma and Grandpa went to Alaska. Grandma and Grandpa took our little video camera along. Grandma and Grandpa showed our kiddos lots of cool movies they made, including... tugboats.

These two are headed out for a ride in their tugboat. I wanted to come too.



2. Brown

This is the best dog ever.



Except when she chews the trim off our house and kills fawns and destroys my broccoli plants and steals bread from the chickens and digs holes where I least expect them and eats the neighbor's cats and gets sprayed by skunks.

What a life.

Yeah. Otherwise she's pretty awesome. And pretty photogenic too.

3. Hazy

Mmmmm... warm hazy late September afternoon sunshine... And, oh, what's that? My kids are not only playing together nicely, but they're actually having a smashing good time? Yes, thank you. I will.



That light in black and white? Yes. Yes I will.



4. Coffee or Tea

I'm not a coffee or tea drinker, but once in awhile I add a pinch of that instant coffee stuff to my hot cocoa.



5. Linger

After church... the kids drag their feet through the gravel, hide in the bushes, and hunt whatever small creatures they can find. The wind and sun are both strong. We linger.

Goodbye green

It was as destructive as it was beautiful.



That second night took just about everything, even most of the poor pitiful pumpkin plant that was carefully tucked underneath a thick comforter. I'm guessing the corral hit at least 20 F, if not colder. Micro-climates and all, that's simply too cold.

We're more or less done with the growing. For this year.



Now it officially looks like autumn. Tomorrow I'll gladly admit that this is, truly, the most fantastic time of year.

The colors. The light. I'll love it. Tomorrow.

But right now, I'd like to have a moment of silence for my poor sad garden.



Or not?

*sigh*

The colors.



The late afternoon light.



The kinders don't seem too worried about the lack of green.

We've been busy:

a. Continuing to pick sweet corn. Er... popcorn. She'll figure it out someday. And no, it doesn't look like it will be mature enough to actually pop. But I could be wrong.





I'll spare you the picture where she spit it all over.

b. Swatting at the immature giants. They're now bending low to the earth.



c. Scrounging up a very few red tomatoes underneath 8 foot tall weeds, you know... before the chickens get them first.



KinderGARDENS - what week is it anyway? I'm pretty sure Kirsten is the only one keeping track at this point.

It happened

Tuesday was it. The day I knew was coming, no matter how hard I tried to look the other way. Eventually it had to happen. It always does.

Around this time of year, on a normal year, our front entry-way and kitchen are overflowing with goodness. Even if you somehow managed to walk through with your eyes closed, your nose would alert you to the treasures. Buckets and baskets and pails overflowing. Towering piles and packed shelves. Plums and apples and tomatoes and zucchini... Winter squash and pumpkins... Onions. Carrots. Beets. A runaway tomato or three wherever they'd landed.

This year. Not so much. Not much at all.

And I'm nowhere near ready to admit defeat. Not yet. Summer was too short.



I marched into my favorite thrift store with two littles. We were on a mission. I steered them straight toward the big shelf on the west wall. SCORE! We walked out minus a twenty dollar bill, arms loaded with queen and king sized blankets.

Quite frankly, I felt like we'd won the lottery.

Want to know why?

If you visit a thrift store in search of a specific item, you will rarely find it. It's just one of the unspoken rules of thrifting. You have to get lucky. Not only did we find exactly what we wanted, in mass quantities... one of us narrowly avoided toppling a huge top-heavy display of colorful beaded necklaces. Read as: Mom ruined all her fun just at the exact moment it mattered.

Are you feeling my joy yet?

It didn't last long.

I was single-parenting it for the night. By the time I got everyone in bed, I figured I would have two hours at most before it was completely dark out. Two hours should have been adequate to do some judicious harvesting and tuck the more delicate things in for the night.

And then I fell asleep with the Bean.

I ended up with an hour to get the job done. I couldn't really see what I was doing, but I did it anyway. With my twenty dollars worth of second-hand blankets that still reeked of dryer sheets, fifteen clothespins, a couple of good sized rocks for weights and two upside down pots. Fingers crossed.

And sure enough. That was it.



Besides our wimpy pumpkin plant, which I had promised our boys I would try to save, even though I'm pretty sure the pumpkins won't be ripe until December, and I really have no idea how to make that happen...

My main priority had been to save these:



And these:



Ummm... did you see that? I grew a red pepper. Red. Five of them, actually. This is a minor miracle. And no, they're just barely almost not quite ready to be picked yet. Or maybe I'm not ready to pick them.

Hello my pretties. So glad to see you survived the night.



Tonight?

Round two.

Our forecasted low is lower.

Fingers crossed.

Serene

Last weekend we enjoyed some unbelievably gorgeous weather for this time of year. Like, short-sleeve-shirt not-even-a-breeze gorgeous weather. And although our daylight is shrinking day by day at an alarming rate, it means our late afternoon hours are saturated with that amazing light.



But not only was the weather perfect, and the light fabulous...



our Red rooster didn't bother us even once, and the kids dug in their sand-paraboloid with complete and utter joy.



Dare I also say the moisture content of the sand couldn't have been better? It's true.



But if I've learned anything as a mom, I've learned this: beautiful serene moments like these are, truly, only fleeting moments. As I lay there in the grass shooting my happy kids bathed in my favorite kind of light with my piece-o-crap Rebel, I knew. I knew the clock was ticking.

And the micro-second I turned my head?

The little Bean ran.



She ran far far away.

Thank you Lord, for barbed wire fences that have seen much better days, yet still do a fine job of slowing the escape of any semi-domesticated critters.

You Capture: serene

Togetherness

We've been having some amazingly beautiful fall days. I'm still using the clothesline. Our low-lying garden swamp still hasn't frosted. Dirty dishes are still piled high in the kitchen because we can't waste any of these gorgeous days indoors.

The little Bean tries her very best to keep up with her brothers, while I do my best to keep up with her.



A while later she got away from me, and I found her in the barn. Not good!

Strange things show up around the yard when the boys have put their busy brains together. Very strange things, like sixty year old terra-cotta drain tile hanging in a tree lilac house.



We find stuff like this all over the area that the kids roam. All. The. Time. I love it. They're so creative and resourceful, and even more so when they work together.

While the kids dig in the dirt, throw grass at each other, and fall off the back steps... the chickens swirl around us like the tide, coming and going.



This ninety pound beast of a dog is usually somewhere nearby. She just happened to be guarding her buried bread dough from the chickens.



Chickens are thieves, you know.


You Capture - "Togetherness"

Tucked in

When the situation is so desperate that I resort to working in the garden by tractor light for nearly two hours, tucking the most delicate of my precious things in for the night with blankets...



but I'm tripping over pumpkins and squash so my husband grabs a really long extension cord to give me even more light...



so I can cut these beautiful things loose and toss them over to him while the fog rolls in...



of course it's a sign that the next morning we will discover that the forecast was wrong, and there is not a bit of frost to be found anywhere.

You Capture - "Signs"

Facing Myself - September linky

Kids finally in bed, and a million things on my "to do" list.

You know this kind of light makes me twitch if I can't grab my camera and run out the door.

Obsessed? No. "Golden hour" light owns me. I have no defense. You see how much work I'm getting done.



Twenty minutes, I told myself. Just for me.

Got any idea what I found? There are more in my other hand.



A little bit of heaven. In my garden.



They look good, but they taste even better. I can't even begin to describe it.




Okay guys, the linky is open through the end of September. I cannot wait to see the self portraits you all come up with this time! I would encourage you to go back HERE and check out last month's entries. Some awesome stuff in there!

Oh yeah, and HERE are the rules.