Nice cool morning

Nice cool mornings

A beautiful morning last Saturday 48 degrees, wait, what?

We ran a load of tomatoes, peppers, some basil, summer and winter squash up to Jarrod's house, so he could make up a batch of spaghetti sauce. We dropped the bags of veggies in the driveway as James brought a cold home from school so everyone had a cold last week.

Garden is starting to look worse for the wear, we picked some summer squash, and I dug up all the potatoes, we did good a lot of large and bunches of smaller ones, probably 10 lbs all together. It appears we beat the moles/voles that decimated our crops in previous years, the vines were all laying over, some yellowing, so maybe we did simply beat them to them.

We have carrots, we've never been good at growing them, the carrots we get end of season are 2" long generally.  This year we're getting good sized ones.

We're still waiting for a frost for the Kale to sweeten up, I'm itching to make up a batch of Johnnie Searle's Kale soup.  Come to think of it, it's starting to feel like chili weather too.

Rose has the house vents vacuumed out, our oil furnace guy will be here in a couple weeks to clean out the furnace.  We only run the oil furnace over night since we run the pellet stove during the day.

We have our 3 tons of wood pellets now, I'll have to clean the pellet stove out before heating season starts.

The Gold Finches are here, they're eating the seeds out of the Purple Cone-flower in the yard.

Looks like we may have some wine grapes by the driveway, I don't think these are Concord grapes, the grapes are on the smaller side, I'll pick some to see what they taste like, no interest in making wine, this is the first crop of grapes that have produced here on the farm, sure are a lot of grapes though.

We had some worms in the fridge, for fishing that had to go.  I put them in the garden, bunch of dillies and some trout worms.  There are a bunch of Tomatoes to pick again... ugh...

We'll work on the kitchen side sill this weekend, a rotted clapboard needs to be replaced before the fall rains come.  We worked on the house both Saturday and Sunday.  Part of the charm of owning an old house. There is a clapboard on the foundation that is rotted, we'll have to see if the sill itself needs work too.   Turns out it was just the clapboard and the sidewall board that had a bit of rot, fairly easy to repair, some hydraulic cement, and some caulk to seal the new boards and any cracks in the cement.  The job took two days because nothing, and I mean nothing, is straight, or square in this old house.  One of the sections started out at 4" exposure and 3 feet further down was at 3 1/4" exposure.

Before and After

Some paint touch-up and it'll look great again. We were able to remove some old unneeded wiring too.

Bottle gourds inside the fence are growing like crazy they are halfway down the fence line 20' or so.

Roses Zinnia row, you can see the tendrils from the bottle gourds are everywhere 

 

We looked at the Lakota squash this weekend we need to wait for them to have a hard shell before picking them. You test them using a fingernail to ensure they are hard on the outside. The Lakotas, are just about ready, this squash variety didn't do well for us, we replanted once, the plants that did come up so far have only produced two squash.  I hope it's good.

Pumpkins, still a few green ones coming along.

 

Butternut squash shown, Summer and even our Zucchini are still producing.

Stay safe out there!