We are into the final days of autumn here in NW Ohio.  Actually, our season has lasted longer than normal, I think.  It's beginning to get chilly overnight, but the days are rather warm and very breezy.  Towards evening we often get short, fast-moving showers.  Then the sun tries to peek back under the clouds just before sunset and makes beautiful rainbows. Last week we had rainbows two evenings in a row!



In the kitchen we're working on putting up apples.  We have over 30 quarts of apple pie filling, a multitude of applesauce, and a fair amount of apple butter.  After three days of cranking the apple peeler/slicer/corer and processing jar after jar of produce, I have had my fill of the smell of apples and cinnamon!  

This year's crop of alpaca fiber is back from the mill.  This year I have skeins and skeins of yarn in different natural colors and weights.  I also have rovings to spin, great heavy bumps for large-needle knitting, and felted sheets for sewing.  By special request I've dyed some fiber...my first foray into professional dyes.  I used my trusty old crockpot and dyed three or four skeins at a time.  The yarn came out of the pot bright and variegated.  Happy dyer, happy customer!

I've been working on my knitting over the last year or so.  I now consider myself to be a confident advanced beginner!  I've just finished this watermelon-colored shawl.  Making the triangles was a slight challenge, but I'm very pleased with the results!  Next I will try to conquer cables!

And last, but certainly not least...reading material!  When I can find a quiet moment, I've been working my way through the Murdoch Mysteries by Maureen Jennings.  I started reading them after I finished the Murdoch Mysteries tv series.  I would say that the programs are loosely based on the books.  The William Murdoch in the books is now a completely different character in my head.  But I love the historical nature of the novels and will be very disappointed when these are finished as well. 

Enjoy!

From the Garden

Today I harvested the first real bounty that I've had in years from my garden!  The soil here at the Flats is very hard with clay and there is rock only a few inches below the surface of the ground.  This is what made us the Great Black Swamp not so many years past.  Not very conducive to gardening!  This year I experimented with inexpensive, store-bought square foot gardens, adding new garden soil and compost from the alpacas.  Most of the plants in the garden this year were volunteer plants from the compost heap; some strange new form of decorative gourds that I purchased last fall from the local grocery store, a lovely hybrid of tomato that is a combination of Roma and cherry tomatoes, and a couple of cantaloupe plants.  During the very dry conditions in June, I ran a soak-er hose out to my boxes.  The vines and plants have gone WILD!  I have dozens of gourds coming along and enough tomatoes to eat every day.  There are a half dozen cantaloupe hanging on the vines and the lavender and lemon balm is thriving!  This fall when I clean up the gardens, I will build more permanent boxes and use the pieces from the old to make a new compost heap.