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     This is the end of a full week of work.  We await the arrival this afternoon of cousins driving from Georgia to Pennsylvania and look forward to an evening of visiting and reuniting with them.
     The property looks great, it is all mowed, weeded, weed whacked and trimmed.  The house is clean, truly clean for the first time in over a year now that all construction is done.  The year has brought the erection of the stone masonry fireplace continued into the basement, the installation of tile for a hearth in the basement and tile in the breezeway/laundry room, new cabinets and sink in the laundry room, log and flat wood siding in the basement with an additional bedroom added, bamboo flooring in the basement and shelving in the root cellar for the bounty of the garden, cedar siding down the stairs to the newly finished rec room in the basement.
     This year also brought electric fence around the garden to deter the deer, rearrangment of the garden to give us protected, permanent beds for berries and grapes, for the bounty that garden has provided, for the time and knowledge to can and freeze its bounty for the winter.  New ballusters on the back deck and a thorough cleaning and restaining of it.  It has also allowed the cleanout of much litter from the sinkhole and creek on our property, many decades of appliances, glass, tires, and cans left by others before we bought the land almost 7 years ago.
     We enter the fall with sore muscles, happy to be able to still do this kind of work.  Thankful that we have neighbors who will help, for a son who has the skills to do the masonery and carpentry during the summers between his high education.
     We end this season thankful that we have three beautiful children with spouses/partners that have 5 delightful children between them and that they share those children with us, sometimes for a day here or there, sometimes for an entire month of grandgoodness.
     Life is good.

     Hubby left this morning for a couple of days with our youngest son and his family at Great Wolf Lodge.  I stayed home to puppy sit as Shadow is too soon out of her spaying for boarding.  Shortly after he departed, I set to work weeding the garden.  I have maintained the areas that are actively in use with tomatoes, peppers, beans and herbs, but have neglected the beds that were harvested earlier, the ones that had the peas, potatoes, garlic, onions and shallots and the early beans and cucumbers.  Only about 30% of the garden was in productions this morning, leaving me with 70% plus paths that were grossly overgrown.  The garden space is about 30 to 35 feet square, divided into 5  four foot wide beds, some boxed into 4 foot squares, some just long bordered beds.
     It took me four hours to weed the beds and paths, leaving me with lots of space to reorganize and plant for the fall.  The garlic and walking onions, along with a winter cover crop seed was ordered during the summer and shipped yesterday.  The alliums will take two squares and will be heavily mulched for summer harvest next year.  The local garden center had salad mix, cabbage and broccoli seedlings and blueberry bushes on sale, so when I went into town to get tractor fuel, I bought some seedlings and bushes for the garden.  The fall plants are in with the chard and kale and will be covered on cold nights to get the maximum harvest from them.
     The southern most bed was two raspberry bushes and two blueberry bushes.  The raspberries send out shoots in all directions and since I planned to utilize a bit less of the garden for annual veggies next year, I moved and divided the raspberries, giving them an entire bed and now having 6 bushes for next year.  This gave me space to plant 3 new blueberry bushes, giving them an entire bed.  These two beds were heavily mulched with straw.

     Right now, the new bushes and fall veggies are getting an artifical rain from the sprinkler.  Tomorrow I will tackle pruning, staking and tying up the two grape vines and harvesting tomatoes and jalapenos again, finish mowing the back yard and around the garden area and making yet another pot of pasta sauce for winter enjoyment.

     As for me, I’ve polished off a huge greek salad and am thinking about a nice long hot bath in our huge tub with a glass of something nice and red.

     This week has been fall clean up week.  We have mowed the 30 acres, it is hayed by a neighbor in the late spring and then except for the “lawn” around the house and garden, the rest is left to grow until early fall and it is mowed by us.  This process takes us about 20 hours of tractor sitting.

     The garden clean up is in process as well, gaining ground on the weed overgrowth that started taking over as the various beds of potatoes, garlic, onions and peas were harvested and not replanted with other crops.  The fall garlic and onions along with the winter cover crop have been shipped to me, so that clean up needs to be finished.  The plan for next year is going to involve a bit less space used and better utilization of the space with replanting and giving two beds to berries and grapes with heavy mulch covers.
     Also the basic house maintenance has been neglected this summer with puppy raising, traveling, gardening and the completion of the basement construction, so heavy duty cleaning has also been on the schedule as well.
     Part of the house clean up has been to reorganize my dormer where I have the loveliest walnut table made especially for the space by a local woodworking artisan.  This is my personal space, off of the front of our bedroom, bracketed by our closets and divided off by the extra large wire crate for the mastiff.  The walnut table sits under the windows with a pottery lamp that has been a treasure for years.  A dark wood bookcase sits beside it with fabric bins for my crafting supplies, yarns, and books.  There are baskets of fabrics and totes of desk supplies and sewing supplies.  This area tends to collect disorder until it becomes unusable and this afternoon, my space got dusted, mopped and reorganized, including untangling and rewinding the various skeins of yarn that the shepherd pup had attacked since we got her.

Beautiful day, beautiful place to live!

So yesterday was surgery day for Shadow, the shepherd pup. She went in yesterday morning to be spayed and they found an umbilical hernia in need of repair, so we okayed that as well.  We picked her up around 3:30, still slightly wobbly from the anesthesia with  instructions to keep her fairly still for a week. No rough play, no stairs, no jumping off of objects.

As I’ve commented before, she is like a ferret on crack, a whirling dervish of motion, so we know this is going to be a challenge.  We already know, that if she is kennelled and Ranger approaches, she whines and yelps at him and he barks at her.  When we got her home, I moved her wire kennel to the greatroom area so she didn’t have to climb to the second floor and she willing kennelled up for the remainder of the afternoon.  After our dinner, hubby took Ranger to the doggie park for some exercise and to allow her some out time.  She ate her dinner and laid on the living room rug with a bone for the time they were gone, reentered her kennel without fuss and basically was calm and fairly quiet throughout the night.

Bright and early this morning, she was rattling the cage, wanting out.  Obligingly, I got up, took her outdoors to do her business and brought her back in to feed her.  She was frantically charging around outdoors and once back in the house, zip, straight up the stairs to check on hubby and Ranger, then zip back down the stairs to make sure I was still here.  She sure doesn’t act like she hurts.

She is currently back in the kennel, whining because Ranger is free, clawing at the wire to escape.  This indeed is going to be a long week!

The garden is a mess, chest high in weeds in some unused beds. Only a few tomatoes and beans being harvested and the chard and peppers are kicking into high gear as the evenings cool.  By this time of the season, I’ m tiring of the daily harvest and putting by for winter and the internal debate is do I pull it all up and put it to bed for the season, or do I continue to harvest, freeze and can until I can’t get another tomato or pepper.

The garden has been good this year. There are pounds of peas, beans,  beets and berries in the freezer. More than 50 pints of tomatoes in various forms (plus I took 15 pints to son’s house last week), dozens of jars of jam and 16 pints of pickled jalapenos on the shelves.  There are some potatoes and onions and lots of garlic curing on the drying shelves.

We will run out of potatoes and onions and have to buy from the natural foods store, there will be tomatoes and jam left at the end of winter, but I just don’t ever seem to be able to give it up until the frost kills it off.

By this time of the year, my knitting friends run and hide when they see me coming with a grocery sack, I expect even they are tired of my tomatoes.

Today was my last day of my babysitting gig in NoVa and I had promised at least one outting with our grandson.  He was in a half day camp last week, which made trips on the Metro impossible.  Before heading home this afternoon, we rode the Metro in to the National zoo for a half day outting.  If you have never done this or been to this zoo, the Metro station is several blocks downhill from the zoo entrance and the zoo sits on a hill.  We got lucky as today was the opening of one of the renovated exhibits which was very well done.

 We saw the Giant Pandas and Asian elephants out today, walked many exhibits and I managed to wear a child out.

 This was on our way out and he was as worn out as the lizards behind him.
After riding the Metro back to their house, loading my stuff in the car I headed home for the 4 hour drive. Traffic was unusually light and the drive wasn’t bad until I only had about 10 more miles of interstate and I drove into a horrific thunder storm.  After finally getting on the last leg of the journey and out of the heavy rain, I was treated to a rainbow.

     This post is about puppies and knitting, so…if you aren’t interested in either, today’s post is not for you.

     In early March, hubby and I bought a 9 week old English Mastiff puppy, expecting that we were bringing home an entity that would require, at least for a while, the care of a new baby.  We were blessedly wrong, they are extremely easy pups with a huge bladder, great control and very little urge to chew on things they shouldn’t.  Basically, they are lazy, slug lazy, lawn ornament lazy, but gentle and loveable.

     Next, enter the young German Shepherd pup to raise with him.  This pup is on speed, all the time.  Constantly into things she shouldn’t be, such as shoes, furniture, and has the bladder control of an old lady sneezing.

     Mastiff could be left unattended in the house by 5 months and didn’t need to be kenneled at night.  Shepherd is an untrustworthy little wench.  After we had her for 6 weeks and she was 5 months old, we ventured to leave them both loose in the house for about an hour while hubby was out and I was mowing.  I came in to find this

several partial skeins of yarn strung over the living room, dining room and upstairs from our bedroom into the loft.  I was not amused, but salvaged what I could, threw away the rest and decided that she must be kenneled when we were out without them.  One evening last week, we decided to run down to the local store, about 2 miles away to get some ice cream.  We took the pups out, then left them with their toys in the house and came home to find that she had chewed a silver dollar size hole in the middle of my favorite sock yarn shawl, chewed on the edge of a scarf of my handspun yarn that I was finishing for a gift, and chewed clear through the power cord of hubby’s laptop and we weren’t gone 30 minutes.  I should have taken photos of that damage, but too frustrated with her for the damage and us for trusting her again.  Then two nights ago, the Mastiff decided that since hubby was asleep and Shadow was kennelled, that he would tackle one of the log siding walls in our bedroom, so I guess he can’t be trusted out either.

 I will be making home repairs when I return from my babysitting gig, and while here, I have unraveled the shawl, rewound it and have cast on a new shawl out of a different pattern.  I guess knitting is really a process not a product and it is one of my favorite yarns to knit, so I get to enjoy it again.

     Summer’s end again finds me in northern Virginia, helping our eldest son’s family juggle the beginning of school.  He returned to his PhD program on Monday, began his teaching with his classes on Tuesday.  Our daughter by love had a meeting regarding her school year job and a meeting with her advisor on Tuesday and began classes yesterday.  Our eldest grandson doesn’t start his second grade year until the day after Labor Day.  This puts them in a bind each year, though they plan their schedules to make sure one of them is home on each end of his day, the days that he is off and they are not causes them some stress.
     This year, he is in an afternoon robotics camp, so there aren’t the nearly daily trips on the metro into DC to visit the Smithsonian or the zoo, and there have been very few parts of the day that one of them hasn’t been home when he was, but it is good that I could come and help with the transition back to their school year routine.
     This year, also found a child who is reluctant for school to begin.  This reluctance has reduced somewhat once he found out who is teacher is going to be, a man he was glad to have as his teacher this year.  This will be good for the grandson, as he typically responds better to men.  And he discovered that a couple of his friends are in his class.  He doesn’t do well with change, so these two discoveries have helped his anxiety about starting the year.
     With my gap coverage of his care, being able to transport him to and from his camp, and fixing dinner for the family at night, I hope has helped to reduce some of the back to school stress for them, without me adding to their stress by my presence.

 We are well beyond the halfway point of the mountain growing season.  Some of the tomatoes have died back, the beans are still producing, the kale and chard have been pruned back for another growth spurt as the weather cools.

 When we lived in the city and I still worked, the only preserving that I did was to pickle whatever jalapenos I could grow in my backyard garden and as an annual tradition, my Dad and I would make pomegrante jelly together.  The tradition began one year when his pomegrante bush was very prolific, stalled for a few years when he and Mom moved from the home of my childhood due to Mom’s health.  A few years later, after my mom passed,  he remarried and moved into Norfolk, a neighbor of his offered the poms off of his bush and the tradition renewed until that neighbor moved and the new neighbor put up a privacy fence and I moved to the mountains.

 Shortly after moving here, I heard about the Common Book Project and they were reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle  and I decided to read along.  That book changed my approach to life.  It is about living locally, producing and preserving food if you can.  As living locally is the theme in this community, it was doable.  The garden morphed into the produce that could be root cellar stored, frozen, canned, pickled,  or jammed, that I knew we would actually eat.  The local farmer’s market has pasture raised beef, chicken, turkey,  eggs, locally made cheese, soap, starter plants, bread and more.  There is a local dairy that bottles in glass, also makes butter and sells in one of the supermarkets.  Other than snacks, coffee, tea and bananas, we are living locally.

So far this year, there are about 60 pints of tomatoes and pasta sauce canned, dozens of jars of 3 different jams and pickled jalapenoes,  pounds of beans and peas, plus some tomatoes in the freezer and the freezer awaits the half beef and half pig we have ordered from our neighbor friend that sells at the market.  We hope to eventually have our own beef and chicken for meat and eggs.  It is nice knowing where your food is from and how it is grown.  It is wonderful to be able to preserve it for the season that does not provide and during the winter, I will resume baking our own bread, it is just too hot in the summertime.