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The fog finally cleared yesterday and after the run to the natural foods store for supplies, a garden venture was braved. There is evidence we received a light frost, about a week to 10 days before average, the tops of the Tomatillos are burned and the edges of the western most Thai pepper show some damage, but for the most part, I think we have a little more time. Peppers were picked as well as Tomatillos. The stink bugs seem to love the Tomatillos and many are damaged when I pick them, some so damaged they never fully develop. If the damage is light, I just cut it out before blanching them. If it is heavy, the fruit goes to the hens and as I toss them from 2/3 across the garden some miss. They will be next year’s volunteers. I probably won’t have to plant or buy Tomatillo plants next year. The three dill plants that didn’t come up forever were tucked under and between the Ground Cherries and the bush beans and they survived last night. Not wanting to risk losing them, they were cut and are drying in three small vented brown bags.

The mail brought next year’s seed garlic. The garlic I ordered and some I purchased from a vendor at the Farmer’s Market a few weeks ago will be planted in early November and covered with straw to become next year’s garlic crop.

It also brought the spindle I purchased at the Yarn Tools shop update early this week. This one appealed to me because it is Honduran Rosewood and one of my favorite excursions from our 40th Anniversary cruise was in the Honduras, where we rode horses on the beach and into the ocean around a small island and ate soft tacos in a beachside hut before returning to the ship.

Though the spindle on the left and the new one in the center are both Jenkin’s Finches, the weights are significantly different. The Rosewood one is more than 5 grams heavier and only less than half a gram lighter than it’s much larger cousin, the Aegean on the right. I was unfortunate or fortunate on how you look at it with the lottery. My name wasn’t drawn, so another spindle purchase this week didn’t happen. The fortunate is that I didn’t really need another, nor did it warrant spending the money.

The lack of a Farmer’s Market run and the cooler day inspired me to return to bread baking. It took a break during the hot weather and I would just buy a loaf of sour dough bread at the Farmer’s Market. Since I had pizza on the menu for the night and had to let the flours come to room temperature anyway, I mixed up a batch of yeast raised herb and onion bread and one of plain sandwich bread along with the pizza dough. It looks great and smells wonderful, but I was too full from pizza when it came out of the oven to even think about trying it.

We haven’t seen any Hummingbirds in over a week. They usually stick around until mid October, but not this year. The feeders were brought in and washed. Once thoroughly dry they will be stored away until mid to late April next spring.

All in all, it was a delightful, busy fall day. The hunters apparently were successful in the fog from their text as they left late in the morning. No hunting is allowed on Sundays unless it is on your own land and we neither hunt nor eat game meat, so the deer are safe today.

Last evening after the hunters were gone.

All week we were being threatened with potential frost last night and I had plans to cover parts of the garden. Yesterday, the forecast changed and it looked like the night time temperatures were going to stay above 40, so I didn’t cover anything except the fig is wrapped around the sides with doubled heavy mil plastic. When I got up this morning, the outdoor thermometer indicated it went down to 37 f and the weather app says there was frost warning until 9 a.m. It is so foggy outside that when I went over to feed and release the chickens, I couldn’t even see the garden. It is still densely foggy. If the sun comes out later, I will check for damage, possibly having to harvest the remaining peppers to oven dry. If the tomatillos took a hit, I will pick whatever has any size, and roast them to make a roasted salsa, or toss them in a pot with spices for another few jars of simmer sauce. I should have followed through on my original plan to cover it. Oh well, if it is the end of the season, so be it. I’m sure the peas will be fine and maybe we will still get a small fall harvest of them.

Today begins bow hunting season for deer. The two young men who sought permission to use our low field are down there in the thick fog. I can’t imagine they could see anything. It was thick enough that a deer could forage under their stand and they wouldn’t see it. Now, after 10 a.m., it is just beginning to thin enough to even see that field from the house.

I guess this wasn’t the ideal first day of hunting weather. Having them on the property with bows requires that I have to take the pups out individually on leashes.

I received notification that the spindle I got in the Yarn Tools shop update earlier in the week will be delivered today, and I sit here waiting for the random drawing from their shop to see if I earned the right to purchase one of the ones I picked from the lottery. They are on the west coast, so the posting won’t occur until noon or after here in the east.

We chose not to go to the Farmer’s Market in the cold fog this morning. Later today or tomorrow, I will venture to the Eats, the natural foods store for a little produce, local cheese and local(ish) tortillas (they are made in Virginia a couple of hours from here).

After a few restless, sleepless nights recently and feelings of stress over the daily onslaught of bad news, I concluded that I had slipped back into a habit of too much caffeine. My single morning mug of coffee had risen to two or three. Each day I was making a pot of tea that I drank iced though out the day. This required me to take drastic measures and enduring a caffeine withdrawal headache for a couple of days, but I am limiting myself to 1 mug of coffee and not making a pot of tea that is so easy to just pour and drink. If I want tea, I must brew a single cup and enjoy it hot. For other hydration and thirst, I am drinking our well water, which I find tastes good. With dinner, I add a splash of pomegranate juice to the water. I have slept better the past few nights and feel less stressed.

Another 11 grams of the braid I am spinning was spun yesterday and a few grams of Jacob on my “car” spindle, though not in the car. I really like the way this part of the braid matches the spindle’s colors. I am spinning it in the gradient, and will ply it that way, but don’t know what it will become. I also spun nearly a bobbin full of a much heavier yarn to be plied with another singles hopefully to be Aran or heavier weight to knit historic style hats.

The fog is finally lifting, I think I will go check on the night’s damage to the garden.

Stay safe out there.

I have just finished listening to a very thought provoking Podcast, hinting on a topic my husband and I have often discussed.  Though the Podcast was not directly on the topic, it sent me here.  The topic is societal fear, the Podcast actually was on the history of public bathrooms and how we got where we are now with sex separate facilities and the issues they cause for transgender, non-binary, intersex, and disabled people.

It takes me back more than 3 decades when as a  Mom with young children, I was faced with having to take a son into the women’s room or hubby having to take our daughter into a men’s room because we didn’t want them going into the other facility on their own or leaving them outside to wait while we went in.  Even then, the idea of single the sex bathrooms seemed absurd to me.  You don’t have them on buses or airplanes.  We share bathrooms in our homes and in some small businesses that have a single facility, why can’t we have bathrooms that accommodate everyone.

The answer is fear, unreasonable fear.  It has been pervasive in history.  When bathrooms were a privy, everyone used them without regard to gender or color, then indoor bathrooms came along with water and sewage infrastructure, but women were basically kept at home.  As women entered the workplace, the system changed, but only for privileged white America when we unnecessarily segregated a whole population out of fear.  Building code was written to mandate separate sex bathrooms. Then after desegregation, the fear switched to AIDS, could you catch it in a bathroom?  Then more open acceptance of same sex marriage, or has it just fomented more irrational fear as the issue of which bathroom a transgender, non-binary, or intersex individual must use.

I think most of what drives today’s issues is fear of change, fear of what people perceive they can’t control but shouldn’t control.  Fear caused by generations of ignorance by people raised to believe that anyone of a different race, religion, gender identity, or nationality is alien and suspect if not outright dangerous.

Back to the Podcast, the code, through the efforts of lawyers, researchers, and architects who are themselves in one of the categories in the first paragraph or at least open minded and not driven by fear, has changed to allow new building to have one large bathroom with grooming areas, hand washing areas that vary in height and are  long “sinks” angled away from the user, and toilet areas with stalls of varying sizes to accommodate everyone regardless of size or disability.  This would work, it would be as they put it in the podcast, “more eyes” to prevent unwanted behaviors, but unfortunately the code doesn’t mandate this change, just allows it and as long as the FEAR is there, it will continue to be a problem in our society.

It is time for our small-minded fear to be cast away and recognize that we are all humans on the same planet and can benefit from each other’s cultures, beliefs, ideas.

With all of the pears and most of the apples gone, and now the grape vine totally stripped of leaves, I think I must have midnight marauders. I have run deer out of the orchard dozens of times, but nothing has ever bothered the grape vine before. Two days ago, one end was stripped of leaves, yesterday about half, this morning, it is bare.

There is still plenty of wild vegetation and grass so I’m not sure why they are coming this close to the house and eating the grape leaves. I guess as soon as the weather chills, it will get a pruning job. I’m glad I got the grapes before this occurred because the few that were left to ripen are also gone. Perhaps, I need to run the electric fence strands around the orchard as well as the garden.

A couple of years ago, I was looking for a waste free chicken feeder to put inside the coop and found the plans for this using a 5 gallon bucket, a hole saw, 3 PVC elbows, and it is perfect. It holds an entire 25 lb bag of feed pellets, three hens can feed at a time, and because they have to stick their head in and down to get to the food they don’t toss it everywhere or scratch it out like they do in an open or tray edged container. The only drawback is the lid provides a great perch to look out the windows toward the house, so I have to add a flower pot on top to keep the lid from getting fouled by the fowl. That designer was genius and the plans were easy to follow. If I hung it, it would become a moving target, bet it would be fun to watch them trying to feed, but it sits on an old galvanized feeder tray to raise it off the floor a few inches.

I finished the mittens yesterday and returned to spinning the ruby and purple Shetland/Bombyx braid, using my new ring distaff and the Finch spindle. I can’t model the mittens as they are for someone with small hands like a tiny woman or larger child. I had someone look at mittens in my booth two years in a row and say they wanted mittens when walking their dog, but their hands were too small for the ones I had. I will put then in the shop with the dimensions posted, maybe they will fit someone’s idea for mittens. There is enough of the blue Tunis left to spin for a matching hat. The mittens need to be washed and blocked still.

It is a slow day. No canning. I still need to mow before we start getting rain again.

Take care and enjoy the pending fall weather.

I just picked the last 3 small cucumbers and one huge yellow one that was missed and was given to the chickens. The refrigerator is full of pickles, but no more fresh ones.

This morning we had a successful, non stressful run to the Farmer’s Market. I paid for a month of membership to preorder so I could be in the first hour of shopping. Everything I ordered was ready with my name on it, prepaid (except one item as the vendor had a very legitimate reason to not be there today). I also found out that one of my favorite vendors that isn’t on the site preorder, has a way to preorder from him too. And I already have arranged with two other vendors to do the same. I was in and out in under 10 minutes with minimal contact. Only one vendor’s stand was so crowded that I turned around and skipped it.

One of the items preordered was a double container of fresh figs. I came straight home with them and made 3 more quarter pints of fig jam. I wish I had bought twice as many. Maybe there will still be more next week. Last week a vendor had Asian Pears and I had hope to buy enough to make a batch of my favorite jam, but not this week. Maybe some kind of pears will show up and I will use what I can get.

Then we had succeeded in snagging a curb side pick up from the grocer and all the other items that we normally get from there were prepaid and delivered safely to the back of the Xterra. I finally felt safe shopping today as cases rise in our region.

A good day, ended with a walk around the pond.

Except for two quick stops at the fabric store for mask fabric, I haven’t been in a big box store since March. After the spread seemed minimal in our region, I did begin going back to the grocer for the items I can’t get curbside at our local natural foods store, but that was mainly because the grocer had few curbside slots and I could never get one. Now the students are back in town and though there are signs on every building door, sandwich board signs on the sidewalks, and flashing electric message signs at both ends of “downtown” reminding students and year round residents to wear masks and practice social distancing, there are far too many who don’t. Most everyone in the grocer is wearing a mask, but often improperly or putting it on only to go through check out, or wearing a face shield without a mask, so we did a major non perishable run early in the week and will try to get curbside delivery slots in the future when we need to shop again, now that they have more of them.

The safer shopping sites are the local natural foods store and though I try to use their curbside delivery as much as possible, I have gone in the store a few times during slow hours. To help reduce the virus spread, you have to get an employee to fill any bulk item and herb/spice items you need, so they prefer pre-ordering, even if you elect to go in the store to pick up the items. I feel they are still a “safe” place. Right after the stay at home order was put in place, the Farmer’s Market closed for a while, but with some of the phases lifted, they are open and trying to control the volume in the market at one time. They have put crowd barrier fencing around the market and have someone who monitors the exits and entrance to keep the number of people inside at or below 50 customers plus the vendors. It is an outdoor market. There are chalk arrows drawn to try to direct traffic and the first hour is for pick up of pre-orders only. A couple of the vendors that I shop don’t have pre-order option that I have found and sometimes I’m not sure what I want until I see what is available on their signboard or in their bins to make my decision. As a result, I can’t use the early hour and try to get there just as it ends. I have suggested a senior citizen’s hour, or to let those of us who are over 70 to shop during the pre-order pick up hour, because if you pre-order, your items are separated and held aside for you so it doesn’t really matter when you go. This morning, in spite of it raining from Laura passing through, there was already a line of about a dozen people waiting to enter when we got there. I stood in the light rain in my raincoat and waited my turn. Once inside, there were too many people not heeding the arrows and walking between stands or around them, going out the entrance, and just standing in the walk through aisles, not walking on through. It no longer felt safe to me. I don’t want to lose that option, but I may have to either let it go or use only the pre-order and not shop the vendors that don’t do it.

As we were driving back out of town, there were huge groups of students, standing close together, some without masks, waiting to get in some of the restaurants that serve breakfast. Hubby and I have a bet on how long it will be before the University has to go back to online classes only and the local public schools shut their doors and become virtual again. We wonder if the opening of schools across the state will throw us back to a Phase 1 lock down.

I did treat myself to a bouquet of fresh flowers along with my veggies, cheese, butter, and sausage.

Last night I got half the lawn area mowed after pumping up the tire and going down to get fuel. This morning after a Farmers’ Market run during “Seniors only hour” we arrived home to find the younger two farmers finishing the mowing of the south field and moving the already baled hay to the side for picking up. After the one mowing left with the big mower, he returned with a huge brush hog and cleaned up the areas I usually mowed a couple of times each year when we had a brush hog. I finished mowing the lawn areas that were thick and tall from all the rain. It has all been mowed at last. They teddered the newly mowed area and will come back Monday afternoon to rake and bale it and as they were leaving, they brought me a shaggy untied half bale for use in my chicken run in wet and snowy weather.

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I love some of the wildflowers that have claimed spots that they are safe in around the house.

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Last night at dusk when I went out to lock up the hens, there were two does and 3 fawns in the orchard. They stayed very still until I got close and opened the run gate. At that point, they took off in two directions and I caught a picture of one doe and her spring twins running off.

I love life on our farm.

Stay safe, wear a mask so you are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

I finish one batch of fermented, quick brined, or canned cucumbers and another basket fills on the kitchen counter. I have had years when to have a cucumber or make a small batch of pickles, I have had to purchase them at the Farmers market for $5 a pint which only makes two pints of pickles. This year is a cucumber year. I have canned 5 3/4 pints of Spicy Bread and Butter, 6 pints of Garlic Dill (though one didn’t seal and is in the refrigerator), a gallon of Quick Brined Dills, 3 quarts of Fermented pickles. I will probably make one more batch of canned pickles. The refrigerator is filling.

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Slowly, the tomatoes are ripening, but it doesn’t look like there will be a glut of them to can this year. Lots of greenery and plenty of tomatoes, but not huge quantities. The peppers are beginning to produce, except for the bell peppers that are competing for space with the cucumbers that refused to stay on the fence. I am nearing the point like you do with zucchini where I’m ready to cut the vines and give the other vegetables a better chance. We can only eat so many pickles.

The second planting of bush beans is blooming, so soon there will be fresh beans again, and the third planting germinated nicely. It is now August, and I need to think about how to plant a fall garden. The box has still not been repaired and nor the larger one built. It has either been hot as the gates of hell or pouring rain.

Last week, the department of transportation that maintains our gravel road dumped crusher run gravel on the road and didn’t run a roller over it. Night before last, it rained hard for hours. Yesterday we were going in to the library to return a book and pick up a hold for me and discovered that their efforts all washed downhill and filled the ditch at the top of our culvert to road level, totally blocking our culvert and causing the rain to wash down our driveway, destroying the upper third and causing significant gullies all the way to the bottom near the house. I called VDOT first thing yesterday, but they did not come out yet and it rained again last night and we have heavy rain forecast for tomorrow and Monday. Hubby is supposed to take his motorcycle in to the city on Thursday for inspection, oil change, and to see if the dealer is purchasing used bikes as he can no longer ride but for very short sessions. At this point, he can’t even get out. I will try to use the blade on the tractor to repair the worst of the damage, but there is no point until they open the ditch so rain doesn’t run down our driveway. With only 5 houses on the nearly mile long road and 3 more off the state maintained road that have to use it to get out, they will never Macadam surface it. Since they are unwilling to accept that the ditch is on the wrong side for much of the road and no culverts to direct it where it is a reverse swale, the problem will be ongoing. I don’t know the solution. We have graded, had gravel dumped, graded some more, raised a dam along the top edge of the culvert and a directional hump across the top of the driveway and nothing works when it rains hard enough to wash the road into the ditch. The two cars can bump and bounce over it, but the motorcycle can’t, it is tricky on the gravel even when it is well repaired.

The July spinning challenges are done. To end the month, there was a lottery for 18 spindles and because I completed the Tour de Fleece with all 23 scavenger items found and because I fulfilled the 15 minute challenge every day the next week, I got three entries. The winners will be posted this morning, and today marks the start of the usual monthly challenge to spin at least 25 grams of fiber only on Jenkins spindles during the month. I ordered some dyed Tunis for my rare breed credit, and some dyed Shetland with Mulberry Silk for my main spinning and emptied both spindles before dinner last night. I still had about 20 grams of the blue, yellow, and white Merino with Bamboo left and spun half of it last night on a different spindle and will finish the rest on that spindle today before I start my August Challenge. Most of it is plied on my wheel and as soon as I can finish this fiber, it will be plied to the rest and let to set for a day or two on the bobbin then wound off and washed.

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Back to spindle spinning to finish the fiber.

Stay safe everyone.

An old song, but the song of this summer. Everything seems to be happening in bits and pieces.

We are entering August in a couple of days and we still have half of the big south field in standing hay. That has never happened since we moved to this farm. Usually the hay is down, baled, and hauled away by the end of the first week of July. This year they finished part of one field, were threatened with rain so teddered, raked, and baled that part. Then another window opened and they finished the upper fields. Last week, the older farmer (a decade my junior in calendar age, a decade older in physical age) came and worked alone as the younger farmer workers hold day jobs and usually work late afternoons and early evenings when the storms threaten. He started mowing the south field, got maybe half done before he had to quit for the day, then it rained on it. He teddered it two days in a row and with pending rain, he raked and baled 19 more 5 X 4′ round bales alone yesterday afternoon.

And more rain is due, so the rest of the field won’t get done anytime soon. Fortunately, all the fields they work and have been able to get done are producing higher yield, quality hay, so if they lose the remaining 19-20 bales down there, they may be able to at least sell it for contractor’s work.

The garden is providing in bits and pieces, too. There has only been one canning session, a batch of Spicy Bread and Butter pickles, though another of them may be in the near future. The cucumbers are loving the heat and rain showers and I bring in a basket every couple of days. Two half gallon jars of quick brine dill pickles have been made and put in the refrigerator this week, two quart jars of fermented dills are working on the counter, and there were at least a dozen finger sized cucumbers last night that will be ready in a couple of days. Two huge ones were missed in my earlier searches through the sticky vines and they were broken in half and tossed to the hens.

Not yesterday’s basket, but typical, cucumbers, a small handful of jalapenos, a tomato or two, a couple of tomatillos that are about egg sized, and last night, a huge bunch of basil to dry. The tomatoes and tomatillos are popped into gallon bags and tossed into the freezer until there are enough to prep into sauce for canning. The jalapenos quick brined a pint at a time when there are enough to fill a pint. I am making the brine a half gallon at a time and keeping it in the refrigerator to heat up what I need per pint, though I may switch to quart jars soon to save the pints for canning tomatoes and later applesauce. Because it is just two of us at home, quarts are used for dry storage and not for canning except for quick brine jalapenos. Hubby will go through 8 or 9 quart jars a winter.

Yarn is being spun in bits and pieces this summer too, a tiny spindle full at a time. When the spindle is full, the singles are wound off onto a bobbin, when a second spindle is full, the two are wound together into a ply ball. When the ply ball gets about the size of a baseball, it is plied on the spinning wheel with each ply ball being added to the bobbin as it fills. When the bobbin is full, there is enough yarn to be a decent skein and it is wound off, tied, soaked to full it and set the twist.

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Today or tomorrow, the second tiny spindle that I am getting in a trade for a larger spindle should arrive. Tracking showed it arrived at the local distribution center in the middle of the night. The spinning in bits and pieces has been a conscious choice to center me and to slow down the rate at which I create items that would likely end up in my shop, as craft events are not happening and as people are out of work, nothing is selling. Yesterday, I received back several skeins of yarn that had been for sale on consignment in a friend’s lovely little yarn shop that she has closed, so it too will be added to my shop. If you are a knitting, weaving, or crocheting reader that doesn’t spin, be sure to check out the new listings in the shop, there is a link at the top of the blog. I have added about 8 new yarns this week and will add more soon.

Each morning as I am heading out to do chores or sitting on a porch to enjoy the cool morning with my breakfast, I find webs. The one in yesterday’s blog was gone by afternoon and back this morning. This one was in the tiny plum tree that though it is about 4 years old can’t get a good start because the deer keep clipping off the new growth. I have put temporary fencing around it and they still manage to get to it.

My fig that I bought last year in a big pot had a couple of figs on it when I purchased it. It was only about 18″ tall then. Of the figs on it, I got 1. It didn’t appear to have survived the winter, so in the late spring, I mowed over where it was planted and the next time I went over to mow the orchard, I saw new growth. It is a variety that will die back each winter and regrow each spring. It is a much more vigorous plant than I brought home, but alas, no figs. I will give it more protection this winter, perhaps build a mini greenhouse shelter around it with the corrugated plastic panels that are coming off the rotting chicken tractor.

Last year, my only remaining peach tree produced fruit, but every peach was small and had tiny holes that oozed a clear sappy goo, and they rotted before they were ripe enough to pick. This year the peaches were large enough to be good, but again, each peach has the tiny holes and are rotting on the tree. I tried picking a few that seemed intact, but once in the house, they too started oozing and rotting before they ripened. I don’t know what is causing it, I don’t like to spray. Maybe peaches that I don’t purchase at the Farmer’s Market are just not in my future. It is keeping the deer fed and right now smells fermented, so I may see staggering critters on the farm.

The grape vine that I was sure would not do anything this year after I sharply pruned it and tied it up off the ground is very vigorous and full of fruit that is just beginning to turn from green to Concord blue/purple. There will be grape jelly.

Now I need to learn how to properly prune it so we get fruit again next year.

Take care out there everyone.