A Pinch of This, a Bit of That...

It turned COLD over the weekend, to coordinate with the time change and the changing of the calendar page it seems.  We had freezing temperatures Saturday night and last night, and it seems odd to be getting the girls off to school in actual day light!

I did have the chance ahead of time to pick the final peppers, peas, tomatoes and cabbages in the garden, and to bring in a couple of potted plants.  J's tiny cauliflowers, planted back in May, are finally doing something, and L's little cabbages remain brussels sprout size, so I did cover their 8 foot bed to give them a bit longer to TRY.  The garden is looking sleepier, with only root crops yet to harvest:  carrots, parsnips and sweet potatoes.

I also spent half the day on Friday gathering leaves for the garden.  I will say with my favorite poet, Robert Frost:

"I have been treading on leaves all day until I am autumn-tired.
God knows all the color and form of leaves I have trodden on and mired.
Perhaps I have put forth too much strength and been too fierce from fear.
I have safely trodden underfoot the leaves of another year."

JP managed to install our new induction cook top.  Hooray!  We were so spoiled by our last cooktop's quick heating and cooling, that I found it almost insuffferable to use the gas for only a week!

 

JP and I stacked some wood for the outdoor wood burner, just in case we need to fire it up in the near future.  So far, we have enjoyed a warm blaze in the woodstove in our great room morning and evening to take the chill off.  The sunshine has warmed things enough during the day to let it expire.  One of these weekends will have to be full on cutting, splitting and stacking, so that we do NOT have to do it every weekend this winter like we did last year!

We did some baking this weekend too:  spiced pumpkin seeds, and French bread.  Both were delicious!

The Chick-bit house is coming along.  I finished the outside door, but still have the inside door to finish. 

 

We had a brief intermission this week while we tried to come to a consensus on the water storage unit.  We ended up getting back a rain barrel that we gave away some 5 or 6 years ago, and that got passed around a bit.  The price was right, and it fits the bill!  The plan is to have a contained water system for the chickens, something like this:



Photo by Stephanie Dayle
 



We had a sob-fest on Saturday night when we watched "The Fault in Our Stars."  It was very good, but as always, the book was better!  We rounded off the weekend with a nice dinner at my parents' house under the bright sunshine from their sky lights!

So...here goes another week.  The first order of business is sitting by the fire and deleting music from my phone until I find memory enough to install the iOS upgrade!