Stocking up and preparing for fall
Reports of first frosts
trickle down to me from friends in New England. We're supposed to
be safe in southwest Virginia until October 10, but I can feel the
change of season pushing against our garden. Tuesday, I scurried
around freezing the year's last batch of corn along with some okra and
broccoli. Cross-striped cabbage worms had crept in amid the
broccoli florets while I ignored the garden last week, so I tried to
soak the heads in salt water with little success, instead ending up
just picking off the caterpillars.
Still to be harvested this week are peas,
swiss chard, green beans, basil, and summer squash (ate our first
squash from the fall bed Monday!). We might even dig up
our sweet potatoes since they need a warm
curing period just like winter squash.
Suddenly, other projects
are also asserting their importance. That water line we nearly
buried in the spring needs to be finished, our bathing and chicken waterer construction
shed looks awfully important all of a sudden, and even the worm bin
will require some care to bring it through the winter. Since we do our
laundry in a wringer washer outdoors and dry the clothes on the
line, now's a good time to hurry up and wash all of our bedding before
cold weather makes drying comforters impossible. We'd also
like to turn our broken fridge into a cheap root cellar, but that
project may not make it onto this year's agenda. Fall sure is a
busy season!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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