I notice that the last time I made a post to this thing was August 25th or so. No!!! Cant be! Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago? Well, evidently time is still running away from me, and I simply don't notice it.
Fall is always my favorite season, partly because it's a relief from the heat and nonstop work of summer. Not that there's any less work, really, but it's easier to do in the cool. I spend a lot of September into October planting the newly-divided iris rhizomes, and then if the weather's not beastly yet, I plant garlic and maybe a few flower bulbs in middle to late October. Then it's on to Turkey Season in November, plus the making of lotion bars and soaps for the holiday markets. Things don't let up much until January, when we might be able to plan on being snowbound for a little while, and then mudbound for a longer while.
This is also pretty much the end of produce season here (except that a lot of us now grow winter crops in cold frames or unheated greenhouses, so in some ways it never ends). Our first frost was September 22nd, and the first hard freeze was the next morning. The dynamics of the farm changed right away, of course--goodbye to the summer squash, and the beans, and the tomatoes. And the hens slowed down gradually, so that now we're only getting 4 to 6 eggs a day from our 50 or so chickens. That's okay--we believe our girls need a vacation, too, so we don't force them to keep laying all year (you can do that with supplemental heat and light, but ours need to make new feathers for winter instead of putting all that protein into making eggs). They'll start again, slowly, a couple of weeks after the winter solstice.
The apples have been terrific! I have one tree each of seven different varieties, and I'm finding that when I planted them ten years ago I cleverly put in apples that ripened sequentially rather than all at the same time. Too bad I didn't label them somehow, though, so I would be sure of which was which (I really thought I would remember, you know). I've now identified the Royal Gala and the Fuji, but I'm not positive about some of the others yet. Still, I know that I'm really lucky--we're so isolated that so far none of the usual apple pests have found us, and something in our soil or water or weather is giving us incredibly flavorful fruit, which has been a boon, as everybody has apples this year, and the markets are glutted (so are the turkeys, which no longer come running when an apple hits the ground).
So the adventure continues, in the wind, on the plains, in the Fall.
