Hope you had a good Labor Day weekend. This is another of those holiday weekends when the publisher of The Preston Citizen (and other small town papers in our corner of the world) decides not to have a weekly edition. So, those of you who are blog readers won’t get the usual recounting of people’s activities by names, places.
It is the time for the last picking of late green beans, for making pickles, including pickled beets, some even trying pickled eggs. Raccoons are invading the corn patches in our gardens so residents are trying to beat the critters to the ears. If one has strawberries or raspberries that pick up again in the fall, that is one more thing to add to the list of harvest activities. Not quite time for winter apples, but the late summer ones are falling from the branches. Just made a tasty apple cake tonight with some of my Wealthy apples, an old tree that has been on our farm longer than I have, and that is a long time.
Rain showers are unpredictable and seem likely to descend when the last crop of alfalfa has been mowed and is waiting to dry in the windrow. This third crop has been looking promising in irrigated fields, but to get it all the way from growth into the bale and barn is always a challenge. The fall monsoon weather moves in just at the peak of readiness with the hay. The beautiful heads of fall grains are being swept off the straw with the blades of the combines, loaded to trucks from the full bins and hauled to storage, either a farm silo or the mill down in town. It is a good time of year. Unless the machinery breads down and frustration rears its ugly head.
For the readers who live some distance away, yes, our skies are still filled with the smoke from the California fires. Some days it is more dense than others and we are grateful for shifts in weather that clear the smoke out even for just a day. Eyes and lungs are all feeling the effects of the smoky air.
No comments:
Post a Comment