The O-Zone

The aspens are already gold, and with winds kicking up today as weather moves in, I thought I’d better take a picture while the leaves are still attached.

The wind means the aspen leaves are twittering and rustling, and soon they will carpet the ground with gold.

Absolutely adore this time of year, getting ready for winter.

Indian Summer weather yesterday gave us a window of opportunity to paint the garden gate and gazebo roof front, sides and back.

I'm looking at the big plain brown space as a blank canvas and deciding what design to paint on it next year. It needs a second coat of paint but the temperatures aren't going to be high enough to do that this year, before winter.

Our low temperature yesterday morning was a hard frost at 27F, and we wondered if the hoop greenhouse would be up to the task of keeping plants alive at that temperature. We waited until afternoon when the day had warmed up to a balmy 55F and then ventured down to the garden to see how things fared.

The answer is:  27F is just too cold for a makeshift greenhouse.  The tomato plants, melon, and peppers all took exception to that temperature.  So, it was time to harvest everything remaining and decommission the greenhouse for the winter.

The one melon plant produced 8 honeydew melons (we couldn't resist trying one melon a couple of weeks ago to see how close it was to being ripe). The remaining seven melons are close to being ripe, but not quite there yet.

But on the other hand we’ve purchased less ripe honeydew melons at the store, at a fairly high cost, and had worse tasting melons.  We’re hopeful that another couple of weeks of room temperature will ripen our remaining six melons and then we’ll put them into the pantry for cold storage and enjoy them over the next couple of months.

Green tomatoes ripening on the windowsill. My plan is to tried fried green tomatoes before these get too ripe.

I was going to try that for lunch today but we had to go fill up the gas cans, and we need to move firewood this afternoon, and we want to take a walk, so I guess it will be tomorrow instead of today.

There were more peppers hiding in the plants than we realized. These are just so good, and they will last for several weeks in the fridge.

I also have a bunch of cayenne peppers which need to be plucked off the bush and strung up to complete drying, and then I can grind my own cayenne for a spice.

And we’re already thinking about the garden for next year.  A better greenhouse is high on our wish list, built up between the house and the garage. We still have a lot of work left to do in the garden to get it all set up for winter.  There is snow on the mountains around us, and by November it will be snowing here, if not sooner.

So, we’re used to mouse rodeos, though they are less frequent these days now that we’ve tightened up the foundation and reduced access points into the house. Poor kitty, no real mice to play with, but that’s another story.

This morning we were having a rousing game of fetch with Mishkin, using his toy mice. He was very into the game. And then he ran full speed back towards the speakers for our television set, and Dan heard a very loud squeak. Way too loud for a mouse. Dan grabbed the flashlight and was on the hunt, following the cat.

A brown streak ran across the living room floor towards the couch, a gray streak in the form of the cat hot on its tail. We couldn’t believe our eyes, it was a Short-tailed Weasel! Out from under the couch he ran, then around the couch, and under the end table, back under the couch, back under the television stand. The rodeo was in full swing.

I snatched up the cat, much to his dismay, and stuffed him into the bathroom and closed the door. Yowl!! Much protesting ensued.

We opened the front door and the sun room door onto the porch, hoping Mr. Weasel would notice and leave on his own.  No such luck.  And then we tried our luck with weasel-herding. People think herding cats is tough.

Fortunately for us, the weasel wanted the exact same thing we did – out of the house.  How to communicate that to the weasel was the problem we needed to solve.

By this time our ‘guest’ was under the file cabinets where the printer resides.  This was good.  He was close to the sun room doors and all we needed to do was get him to run in a straight line into the sun room and out the door.  I tried using a back scratcher to move him from out under the file cabinets.  Unlike a mouse, he wasn’t particularly afraid of that.  Dan was watching my efforts, using a flashlight to see under the cabinets.

The weasel would duck behind a wheel and sniff the end of the back scratcher when it got close.  At one point he stuck his head out of the side of the file cabinet and sniffed at Dan, then he ducked back under.  This wasn’t going so well.  We changed tactics.

I laid down on the floor with the flashlight so I could watch, and Dan tried herding.  He had better luck!  A brown streak ran straight into the sun room, and Dan followed quickly, shutting the doors between the sun room and living room to prevent re-entry into the main house.  And then we looked carefully all over the sun room, moving a couple of sacks of bird seeds delivered yesterday, and under the furniture.  No weasel!  He had figured it out and ran straight out the door and outdoors where he belongs.

A successful rodeo.

I released the cat from his captivity and told him what a good kitty he was.  He gave me a puzzled look and has been searching for his little friend ever since.  He’s camped out next to my chair at the moment, on the off-chance his buddy will emerge from hiding.  And something I didn’t really think about before but know now, upset weasels are stinky little fellows.  They have musk glands and he was exceedingly upset by it all.

What we really want to know is how he got into the house in the first place.  Theoretically, I suppose, he can fit into a hole that a mouse can fit into, but he’s so much bigger than a mouse.  We’ll try to figure this out because a pack rat could also fit into a hole that size, at least a small pack rat could.  Sigh.

Gold Rush russet potatoes on the left; Yukon Gold potatoes on the right.

Last weekend we harvested the potatoes from our two raised beds.  We ended up with around 115 pounds of potatoes, roughly two thirds as much of the baking potatoes as the Yukon Gold potatoes.  We aren’t sure why the baking potatoes grew so much better but that’s ok, live and learn.

We bought some blackout cloth and covered one of the lowest shelves in the pantry, for our cold storage.  It stays very cool in the pantry, in the 40F’s,  and we’re hoping this will be a successful method since we lack a root cellar.

Fun!  This is a staple crop and we are excited to have such a good result on our first attempt.  We’ve been enjoying potatoes the past few days for dinner.

Well, we knew it was coming since we spent last week getting a  place built for the cement to go.

The first wheelbarrow of wet cement had been transported to the far end of the new sidewalk and the second wheelbarrow was close behind.

It’s a really neat system.  The cement dry mix is in one hopper on the truck, and water is in the other, and they are mixed together at the site.  So there is no waste.

Dan is supervising the project. He just needed a white hard-hat to make it official. There's the path dug out of the yard, around the bedroom to the back of the house.

Jack is admiring the mixture going into the wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow wielder is waiting patiently.

Wheelbarrow wielders have done their thing, and now the artistic part of the project begins.

It really is almost an art form to get the cement sidewalk all nicely smooth, and then brushed out with a broom.  Bob is smoothing it out with a very large float.  He spent a couple of hours making things look pretty.

Everybody has left and the new sidewalk is drying out. Once it is a pale gray like the rest of the existing sidewalk, it is ready to walk upon. A day or two at most.

So this coming winter we now have another seventy feet of sidewalk to shovel which follows the path we take to get gas cans to the generator.  Instead of having an uneven icy path, we’ll have much more secure footing, and a sidewalk is easier to shovel than grass.  We’re going to extend the flower bed between the house and the new sidewalk, next spring.  It will give me a lot more room for plants.  We’ll have to build a fence to keep the deer and bunnies out.

A roof has magically appeared on top of the arbor in the garden.

The same crew that created the sidewalk also built a roof for us in the garden, to keep the chairs and table dry and provide some shade next spring and summer.  The chances of the grape plants actually getting long enough to go over the top of the arbor were looking unlikely, so we decided a more dry solution was a better idea.

Now I need to decide what color to paint the plywood on the front of the arbor, below the roof line.  And I might as well paint the gate while I’m at it.  So many colors in my head!!!

Can’t think of a better way to celebrate the fall harvest equinox than to go harvest something.

Slicing cucumber, Yukon Gold potatoes, radishes, Walla Walla sweet onions, two small bell peppers, golden beets, and tomatoes.

The golden beets are going to be pickled and they are cooking on the stove at the moment.  This is our first harvest of potatoes and it was like a treasure hunt digging in the raised bed and pulling out some potatoes.  Fun!  The temperatures have fallen a lot in the last week or so, down 25 degrees for the high temperature today at 57F.  It’s going to rain too.

Yesterday I was playing with beads and made a necklace.  It seems like a fall activity.

Amber, red tiger-eyes, brass, and Japanese triangle beads. It kept me entertained for most of the day, putting it together, and then taking it apart again to see how a different arrangement suited my fancy. Fall colors.

Today I’ve been knitting and playing with more beads, and then we played in the garden and now I have some fun work to do.

Cool rainy weather means the cook stove is heating the kitchen, and more importantly from the cat's point of view, cooking his head.

You’d think a fur coat would be sufficient, but he loves the wood stoves and was just delighted that we’ve been using the stove this last week.

Today I’m finishing up the box of peaches, making five pints of cinnamon and peach sauce, and a batch of peach butter.  This afternoon I will make one batch of spiced pluot sauce and tomorrow I’ll finish off the remaining pluots by making some pluot jam and pluot butter.  I’m quite interested in that prospect.

And that will be the end of my fruit playing for the year.  Time to start thinking of what else we need to get into the pantry for the coming winter.  The equinox is only two weeks away.

Had an early morning visitor of the really black and fuzzy sort.

Last years' baby, on his own and looking for something to fatten up with for the winter. He found something!

Plums from the tree are all over the ground.  The deer have been vacuuming up the plums for over a week, and now they have competition.  He’s just a little twerp and he’ll be hibernating on his own for the first time this winter.  Mishkin had a few unkind things to say to the bear before we chased him away.  We try not to encourage bears and this is the first one we’ve had in the yard this year, which is highly unusual.  Normally we see them regularly starting in May.

Flowers from the garden and fruit sauces.

We bought two cases of fruit, one of peaches and one of pluots.  Yesterday I made four pints of a peach sauce and four pints of pluot sauce, for pancakes.  Today I’m going to do that again and I’ll add spice to the sauce, with vanilla bean and cinnamon.  I will also make some peach butter and pluot butter, and jams, and then can the rest.  Fun!  Not all of that will happen today because I’m almost out of sugar.  Oh well, if I was organized I’d be dangerous.

Dan wanted to commune with the garden today, and I tagged along to help carry things.

More strawberries were ripe than we thought there’d be.  We picked a slicing cucumber, enough pickling cucumbers to make a jar, and a sprig of dill for flavoring.  Also a bell pepper and an anaheim pepper joined the harvest.  The bowl of peaches was a gift from Susan yesterday, and it is destined to become a peach pie this afternoon.

Still no sign of frost but the weather could change at any minute.

The last couple of weeks we’ve been enjoying the garden produce a lot. I’ve been making on average 3-4 quarts of dill pickles a week from the three cucumber plants.   So far I’ve made 15 quart jars of pickles.

The yellow snap beans were delicious and all gone. Next year we'd like to plant a whole bed of these plants so I could put up some canned beans.

The Anaheim peppers were wonderful in breakfast scrambles.  There are still two peppers on the plants, and another batch of salsa peppers are growing.  Those will be ripe in a few weeks. The slicing cucumbers are hard to keep up with but so delicious with mayonaise.  The butter head lettuce is almost gone; there are only two heads left in the garden.

A raspberry pie didn't last long around here. So I made a peach pie and that didn't last long either. I sense a theme.

There some new raspberries starting to get ripe but it’s highly unlikely there will be enough to make a pie but snacking will be nice.

Terry is inspecting the first Golden Beets of the season. These are for dinner tonight.

She thought these were cool.  She was clucking at them.

The gladiolus are blooming and I picked some to put in the sunroom today. Makes me want to plant some more bulbs in the garden.

Summer is winding down and we could see a frost within the next couple of weeks, so we are enjoying the nice weather while we have it.

They steal the eggs and bury them in the tundra on top of permafrost for storage.

I wanted to do a pencil drawing of this Arctic Fox stealing a goose egg ever since the first time I saw it.