Frost

Early this week, we had our first frosts, and last night we had our first hard frost.  We're totally into fall now, and I'm doing a lot of stuff to gear up for it. I sure does feel like late October snuck up on me however. 

This afternoon, I'm going to plant garlic. In fact, it's soaking right now in preparation.  Most everything is out of the garden.  I still have turnips to pull up, and waiting for the broccoli to do its thing.  There are loads of black, mushy, and curled leaves that got whacked by frost out there, too. This wasn't a great year for many crops compared to last year.  Some of that was due to weather, and some of it was due to my own experimentation.  Potatoes, for instance, weren't great, but I didn't put enough effort into mulching them like I did last year.  I also planned a lot of crops for a later harvest, thinking that harvesting them in cooler weather would improve their storage life.  The tradeoff there is that lots of those same crops seemed to grow much much better earlier in the season, as I had done in the past.  Next season, I will try really really hard to plan better and spread things out in succession. 

I've got some more strategies to deal with critters in the coming year, as well.  My deer netting bed seemed to work out for the most part, minus the mice, shrews, voles or whatever they are that sneak underneath.  I will also try to grow far less of the tender, ephemeral crops that critters love.  Instead I'm going to try hard to focus on growing those types in succession. 

Last Saturday was the opening of rabbit season.  I've been waiting for that since about March.  I put my first one in the freezer before 8:00 AM.  I've also been seeing two woodchucks in the garden, but every time it happens by surprise, so I haven't addressed that yet.  It's easier to remove them now than in the spring when they'll have babies.  I will speak to my deer hunting experiences in the last month in another post.

Finally, tomorrow is THE CHOP day for some chickens.  5 of them will be going away to freezer camp, including one that will be our Thanksgiving bird.  This will be the first time that we're going to do more than one at a time, and I'm a little unsure about how that will go.  I guess we'll find out tomorrow. 

Harvest Night

Last night, October 7, 2013, was Harvest Night!  Harvest Night is our annual harvest celebration.  It features a meal prepared only from foods we've produced ourselves, minus a few things like oil and salt.  Naomi and I took a nice stroll though the garden, ate the most delicious ripe red raspberries (in October!), ate our first butternut squash of the year, amongst other things.  We also collected a whopping 13 eggs from the coops. 

It was a very blustery fall day, except that it was really humid, and grossly warm.  This morning, however, the temperature had dropped at least 20 degrees from yesterday.  That was a pleasant surprise.  I'm hoping that it'll stay this way now.  We made this year's Harvest Night a small celebration, as I had to get back to work for 7:00.  I'll upload pictures from Harvest Night sometime soon, because it's too late for now.