October Living

October 16, 2008 - Time flies. It's been two weeks since my last post and I have TONS of pictures to post, because boy have we been busy. Who knew October was one of the busiest months of the year?

First, the gardens. We've had a couple nights where frost was predicted. Not quite ready to give in to the winter, Joe and I rushed over to mom's before dusk to cover our precious plants with sheets. So at the moment, nothing has been officially declared dead, but the summer plants are definitely just limping along on their last leg. We're getting a few final tomatoes, but we also picked off many of the green ones to try the ripening inside trick.

I did make a nice pan of roasted vegetables from the garden one night - with carrots, turnips (from a CSA), and celeriac. This is the first time I've ever eaten celeriac and it was fun to work with. Here's me after I pulled it out of the garden - it's pretty wild stuff.

And here are the beautiful carrots still in the ground. They grew tons since the last time I picked any and I ended up being very pleased with how they turned out.

I think we have picked most of our last peppers. We also got a ton of peppers from the stand that had bad spots on them. We had peppers and onions with steak, and I froze a bunch of red peppers for winter, and now we are all peppered out. Things are going great at the stand. My friend Bianca has just come home from Peru, where she was in the Peace Corp for 3 years. Lucky for me, she didn't have much going on for the fall and agreed to work at the stand on Fridays and some random weekends. With her waste-not attitude, she went ahead and made peach and plum jams with the leftover, over-ripe fruit. Here she is -

Two weeks ago was the Craft Fair at the Rhinebeck Fair Grounds, and John has a booth there were he sells apples, tomatoes, peppers, squash, pumpkins, and gourds - and.... CIDER!! You gotta love cider season. Here's me getting ready to bottle a whole bunch of it for the craft fair.

Overall, the stand continues to get better each week, with more and more customers. Now that we have all the fall stuff in stock, it really is beautiful -

We've even opened up some small space inside for a beautiful hutch to showcase our cider donuts, my mom's baked breads, Bianca's jams, and some local honey.

The stand is now open Friday thru Monday, so it's keeping me pretty busy. This coming weekend is another festival at the fair - the Sheep and Wool Festival, so that's where I'll be. But I'm sure you're wondering what Joe's been up to...

First of all - the chickens have moved in with us! It was getting a bit tiresome having to run over to mom's every morning and evening to take care of them, so Joe decided to build a new coop here at our apartment and now they're all here. And his coop is, well, awesome. It is built up onto our deck, so we have them very close at hand in case of emergency. There is a walkway up to their nesting boxes and sleeping area, which gets shut closed at night so that they are suspended in the air where nothing can get to them. Safe and sound and cozy.

And the nesting boxes are laying right on our deck, so we can just stroll out and collect our eggs.

While there is a small caged in area attached to the coop, he also build a little chicken tractor so that they can have access to the whole yard, piece by piece.

And Joe's been chopping firewood like crazy. Here's his accomplishment so far -

While we had a cold spell a few weeks ago, this past week has been a little Indian Summer with temps in the 70's, so we haven't been burning anymore wood yet. I think that's going to be coming to an end today though... it was nice while it lasted.

Time's running short, so I have to get going. But stay tuned, because in my next post I'll tell you about all the interesting things we've been eating now that it's hunting season... :)