Where did summer go? ..a late summer summary

     The best growing summer ever...albeit a bit dry, but lots of heat for the tomatoes and peppers. I sold loads of salad mix to the local restaurants, greens can be a challenge in hot weather so this was a summer to experiment with different varieties. The green and red varieties of oak leaf lettuce became the basis of my salad mix, augmented with spinach, bulls blood beet leaves, arugula and various mesclan mixes. Seeding every 2 weeks gave me a constant supply of fresh baby greens.
     I started a new garden for next year, had a tractor mounted tiller come in and chew up a piece of the pasture, which was then limed, manured, and seeded to buckwheat as a green manure.
     The blossoms  were so lovely and the bees flocked to them, but the buckwheat had to be tilled under to fertilise the soil before it went to seed.
      Trusty old Big Red, vintage 1978, chomped his way through the tangle of buckwheat, and once mixed with soil the plants began to break down quickly.

    

 Darrel came back for his horse and chicken fix.

It's such fun to watch him having such a great time with the animals, and they really seem to be drawn to him.

Avery came and said his goodbyes to the horses, and then was on his way back to Ontario. I miss his frequent visits.


The weather forecasters had us thinking hurricane Earl would blow us all to kingdom come, so we tied down everything important.

In the end it veered off to Nova Scotia but we did get a welcome rain out of it.

We had record breaking high temperatures in late august and the hottest day ever was Sept 1. I'm so thankful to live on the coast as no matter how hot it gets here, its always hotter inland. Counting my blessings these busy end of summer days as I'm up to my elbows in ripe tomatoes, canning, making pickles, preserves, and freezing summer's bounty.

Art all around us

Nature has always been the finest artist of all. When I was small I had a sort of vision of Nature pouring from a multicolored paintbrush in the hand of God. I'd wake up, go to the window, and there would be a brand new beautiful day like a lovely picture I could run into, just waiting to be explored and experienced. I was blessed with a childhood lived outdoors with freedom from electronic distractions of any kind.
And still the outdoors calls far more insistently than all the backed up chores inside... I came upon this beautiful arrangement of apples just as they fell from the tree near our back door. No carefully staged artists still life could rival its balance, design, repetition with variety, light and shadows, and complimentary colors. Design by Nature....
or Nature by Design ?


So today Ive been gathering up all these free gifts from the sky. Its a very tall ancient neglected apple tree that still bears heavily every second year. The perfect apples go to the cellar for eating fresh, the bruised ones get cut up for baking and frozen, still more go to the juicer for cider and apple jelly, and finally theres a potful turning into applesauce. The kitchen smells richly of apples and cinnamon.


Jimmy has been digging the carrots, a marvelous crop this year, plenty for us and the horses too. Here he is being rude with a bunch of them...


The horses get all the tops, all the small and misshapen carrots, and the ones with grubs in them. The rest get layered with damp peat moss in a big plastic tote box in the cellar where they keep beautifully right through to the next crop.






The horses lined up at the garden fence for the carrot harvest, the best show in the country for them.