Rufus has such a good kissy face! I have some photos to share, of recent things.
We harvested green beans. Lots and lots of green beans. My parents came, and we gathered round the bean harvest, and picked all the little beans from their shells so we can save them to plant next year. The focus of the 2019 summer garden was green beans and sweet potatoes. I did my best to harvest and eat the beans as they ripened, so by the time the last of the beans were ready to save for seeds, we were glad to take a break from stringing! If I plant all those seeds next year, we will be covered up in green beans.
Would you like to admire Turkey? She's grown into a giant bird, who coos softly, and squeaks loudly for food. She's a champion pear eater, and sleeps on the top perch with the chickens.
Brandon and I dressed as our future selves for our Halloween costume this year. We sprayed our hair white and grey, emphasized our wrinkles, and added age spots. We also nearly caused a fender bender while taking selfies in the car!
We joked that the best part of going to a party at the age of one hundred and three is that we could wear our most comfortable sweaters and no one thinks it's unacceptable to take a nap during the party!
Somehow, despite his busy schedule, Brandon managed to squeeze in enough moments to build an addition to our barn.
It's a an extension of the roof line, that perfectly shelters the tractor. I was happy to move the tractor out of the hay hoop barn, to make room for my hay bales. Now the tractor is nearer the electricity, which is good in case we need to plug it in to warm up, should we need to use it this winter.
Wendigo was galloping around and hurt her knee. Her good knee. So now she has one bad-ish knee, and one pretty bad knee, and she hobbles. It's no wonder I tweaked my back trying to lift her into the car for a visit to the vet - she weighed in at one hundred and three pounds! The vet took scans and said that her hips are a little bad, which probably puts pressure on her knees. She likely has tears in her ACL tendons. Wendigo's only consolation for her limited mobility is that the pain medicine goes down easiest when embedded in hot dogs. She doesn't mind a twice daily dose of hot dog one bit.
The main route away from home was flooded one day last week. I turned around to try the other route...
and it was flooded too! It's an odd feeling to be trapped at home, but nice to have an excuse to stay home from work.
It was past time to harvest the sweet potatoes. The vines were so pretty all summer, but I was unconvinced there would be real potatoes under the ground. I was wrong!
It took me about five digging sessions, but I finally made my way through the entire bed. I didn't have to dig too deep, as most of the potatoes were in the top layer of loose organic garden soil, and not into the clay subsoil. Even still, it was a lot of work and I couldn't help but dream of the giant bin of organic sweet potatoes at the grocery, all clean of dirt and harvested by someone else! Especially when I would carefully excavate a giant whopper of a potato only to turn it over and find that some type of rodent had gnawed all the way through it! Grrrr!
Even though we shared about a third of the harvest with the voles, the other two thirds make an impressive display on the dining room table.
My root cellaring book says to cure the potatoes for ten to fourteen days at eighty-five degrees and ninety percent humidity. Yeah, right. Who has a sauna fit for potato curing? To store them after they are cured, the book says they need a relatively warm and dry root cellar, or they do well wrapped in newspaper and stored in an unheated room. All the potatoes in the bowl have chewed places, or were damaged during harvest. I've been cleaning them up and baking them.
Brandon prefers that I cut off the chew marks from the voles. So picky! Ha! Even uncured, they are delicious. Maybe they were worth all that effort to dig, after all.
We did all that stuff, bean harvesting, Halloween partying, barn building, dog toting, flooding, and potato digging, and then it snowed. Nice.
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