The Season

So this is an odd time of the year when I am both putting things up and planting. Over the weekend I made three batches of tomatillo sauce. The SB and I went blackberry picking at a friends and hauled home 6 pounds of blackberries after 30 minutes of "work". An amazing year. Hoping for more of that tomorrow and possibly some blackberry jam. I am getting lots of jalapenos which go well with the tomatillos, but the squash bugs have pretty well done in the summer squash, though I am considering one last planting. I have planted August 1 before and harvested before frost. The SB built me a trellis for fall sugar snaps and I am currently trying to cool the soil with a heavy layer of straw. I have put in seeds for lettuce, spinach, kale, beets, turnips, rutabagas, and some other things. I have a flat full of cabbage, broccoli and Brussels sprouts seedlings. The SB also built me a frame from bamboo garnered from the CHO house so that when all these goodies get going, I will be able to cover them with remay for the winter and prolong whatever harvest we get. Assuming we can figure a way to keep the ducks out.

They were great company in the yard yesterday. I took off work early and came home to sort through the potatoes (which I had noticed some fruit flies in earlier in the day - a bad sign). I took everything out that we had harvested and washed and sorted through them all to find the "eat soon" ones that wouldn't store and the ones that were suitable for longer term storage. Let me just say there are a lot in the "eat soon" pile. But I LOVE home grown potatoes, so no worries there. The ducks kept creeping up on me. I think the sound of the water I was using to wash the potatoes in an old dishpan was attractive to them. Though when I offered it, they ran away. They eventually got bored and started nibbling on the SB's old Chevy truck in the drive way, and chasing them away from that was akin to playing with a boomerang.

The ducks are, undeniably, insane. I have named another duck. She is Aretha, duck of many colors. In the filtered sunlight her black feathers have eggplant purple, mallard green and peacock blue colors. Stunning. In direct light she is quite ordinary.