100 posts!

I just happened to notice as I was sitting down here that this will be our 100th post!  I can only imagine how many more posts we'd have if I had a chance to post as often as I'd like. I'll mostly be using pictures to recount the events of the past few weeks and months.

Yesterday was our chicken harvest day, which we've been referring to as "the chop" for a few years despite the fact that we don't "chop" our birds.  The name just seemed to stick. It went well I'd say.  We put 6 birds in the freezer, and Naomi roasted one for dinner, as we usually do on harvest day. I made a ton of schmaltz and put it in the freezer.  I've been trying to use it to make tortillas, which come out much nicer than with coconut oil.

I also managed to successfully save all the blood, which didn't really work out last year.  This morning I cooked a slice with my eggs and it was really good- sort of like organ meat.  It had the mineraly taste of liver, but with a different consistency.  It was really chewy.   There's enough left that I'll probably eat it every morning this week.  I'm sure I'd prefer it stuffed in a sausage casing, if only I had a good source of casings. The cracklins from the rendering process tasted really good just out of the pan, but I ate some this evening (I also accidentally burned them) and didn't enjoy them as much.  I'll have to see how I feel about them next time without burning them.

I spent a good chunk of time a few weeks ago reglazing some of the windows in the house. They were in pretty bad shape, and were really drafty. I focused on the worst ones first. Now I want to do more of them, because it was so easy! It's just time-consuming, and I have to have an open window while I'm working on them. I fixed some of the cracked panes as well, which was also way easier than I expected. I really want to do some more of the upstairs windows so they don't rattle when we have band practice. Around the same time that I did the first few windows, we turned the heat on.  That was sometime around the first week of October. I also want to add weatherstripping to the doors, but that is turning into a bigger project than I expected.

one of my favorite visitors!

Fall came really quickly here, the bright red maple up above was from September 23. The summer had been really dry, and once the rain came back hard in October, all kinds of fungi popped up all over the place, especially in the lawn, and on the dead apple tree. I realized a few weeks ago that I now live with the most beautiful fall foliage in the world. I never really understood most people's fascination with fall foliage, until I was driving home one warm clear afternoon.  I found myself in total awe. The only tree in the yard of my childhood home was a Norway maple, and it never did seem to be too vibrantly-colored in the fall.  The leaves sort of fizzled out and finally dropped. All of the sugar maples up here are spectacular. The oaks are a little later than the maples, and go to a bronzy golden brown after most of the maples are done, and the yellows in the birch leaves are amazing.

Naomi and I used the leaves from a couple big maples in the yard to mulch our garlic beds. We planted a lot less garlic than we ever had. We always end up with too much, and it's too much to keep up with the scapes, mulching it, and weeding it during the growing season. With a smaller patch, we should be able to nurture it a little more and have better quality and less quantity- which also means less curing and storing. After our first attempt at mulching the beds with leaves, they all blew away on a 30+ mph-gust day. The second time I mulched them, I used some orange construction fence that I usually use for cucumber trellis to fence them in. Only time will tell if this is a good method or not.