Nice try, Winter.

I may not like you much, but a foot of snow and temps in the teens are hardly enough to keep this gal from accomplishing her rounds. 

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Bitty Garden Tour

Oh, who am I kidding? This post is likely to have 527 photos.

A sad sight greeted my eyes last week (do pardon the tardiness—I also had surgery last week and recovery is taking a bit longer than anticipated): the first hard frost of the season, covering the grass and nearly-denuded trees and, of course, my veggie garden. Ben and I headed out to grab the last (green) tomatoes from the vine to ripen in the garage or be turned into some sort of preserve.

While most of the plants are indeed done for the season, my darling nasturtium actually doesn’t look bad and the youngest borage plants—borage being my other garden flower love—look as fresh as can be, and the same can be said for, of all things, the dill! The Brussels sprouts are fine, too, of course, and will probably taste all the better for the frost.

Baby “Hillbilly”

But for all intents and purposes, 2017’s growing season is over. This weekend I’ll put it to bed, though leaving up the still-blooming plants for as long as I can. Since it’s done for 2017 (my hopes of a winter garden setup having bitten the dust for the coming winter), why not a little tour?

Pocketful of Nasturtium

After a fashion, I suppose. After an unexpectedly exciting (read: wild and wooly) morning (all is well), Ben and I checked the garden for anything that ought to be brought inside. (Reading Proverbs 10 earlier this week, it must be said, played a part in encouraging me to be more diligent about such things—two of my tomato plants have been very disappointing this year, so I sort of dislike wandering into the veg garden at the moment.)

My nasturtium—which I adore and grow several varieties of—continue to thrive as we stride further into autumn, but there are plenty of seeds to gather from my many nasturtium plants. I just grab them as I see them and roll them into my apron pocket; once inside I spread them out to dry, and once this is accomplished, will toss them into a canning jar with the hopes of seeing them come to life next year. This will be my first attempt at doing so; I’ll have to let you know how it goes.

It’s hard to tell from my phone-shooting-into-my-apron-pocket-at-high-noon photo, but nasturtium seeds look like tiny brains. Fun fact in case you need something quite unusual for Halloween. 😉

For some reason, I don’t seem to have any photos of the blooms themselves! Truly bizarre—but then I’m spending as much time watching the hardworking bees as anything in the veggie garden. Ooops.

At any rate, most of the seeds I’ve gathered in so far are of a nice size indeed, but some of the very small ones remain in the apron pocket; as we walk about the property, I’ll toss them into the woods along our pathways and drive, and see what God decides to do with them. (Yes, whether or not any of them produce at all is up to Him, but these semi-rejects will be far more obviously on their own.) Who has ever been disappointed by nasturtium popping up in unexpected places? Not this gal, and not anyone she knows. Including, presumably, Ben.

Century Mark, Plus Happy Garden Stuff

Hey, last week I finally managed to put 100 items in the shop! Considering all we’ve been through and all that has gone on over the past several months, it was a big deal to me, anyhow.

Not one to ignore milestones, I made sure it was a favourite:

This handsome (almost remarkably so, considering the car is unrestored) ’32 Packard remains one of the most memorable automobiles I’ve ever photographed. She was a lucky find at the end of a very long day!

One of my other loves being gardening, this morning I was overjoyed to find the first zinnia of the season blooming away. Hurrah! (Alas, the lens on my phone was apparently quite smudged, but life goes on. You get the idea, and I was/am so happy.)

Since we moved in so late in the year, we got the garden going even later (mid-June); with lots of unused space therein due to this fact, I decided to fill said space with flowers.

Homemaking 102: Setting Up For Putting Up

The fruits of my labor.

For a little while now I’ve been kicking around the idea of a homemaking 101 series here. More than one woman of my own age or younger has said (enthusiastically, even) she’d love to come across such a thing, however politically and culturally incorrect it is for an American woman to say she has an interest in serious homemaking anymore—and it is incorrect, terribly—so how many would like to know more but are ashamed to speak of it? A sad state of affairs indeed. Homemaking is something I consider important for reasons I’ll discuss in a future, introductory post, but let’s skip ahead a little bit  and talk about canning—it is the season, after all, and that’s what I spent most of my Wednesday doing!

Of course, canning can be done any time of year, no matter where one lives, but autumn seems to be the season people’s minds turn to it. Perhaps this is a throwback to a much earlier age when we had to put up food for the winter lest our family starve, or it’s because many of us recall our mothers or grandmothers steaming up the kitchen while canning seemingly countless jars of tomatoes, applesauce, and sliced pears, but either way, there is plenty of

Candied Jalapenos, aka “Cowboy Candy”

produce to choose from in the fall—the last gasp of glory before winter sweeps in. Preserving is one way to enjoy summer year-round—to say nothing of knowing exactly what it is in the food you’re eating and always having gifts on hand to give. The response I get from handing someone a jar of home-canned anything is quite possibly more rewarding than eating whatever it is myself!

Many people seem intimidated by the idea of canning, but it’s very easy to learn, really; most recipes, such as this one (for which I’m hoping I can find a few last local raspberries), give you step-by-step instructions that probably sound simplistic to novices. What seems to unnerve people most is the possibility of Death By Home-Canned Goods, followed by the process itself.