Our farm store is still open 6 days a week. We are only closed on Wednesdays, so every day is full. We are still harvesting heirloom tomatoes, summer squash, cucumbers, eggplant, green beans and apples daily. The tomatoes are really loving the warm afternoons and are still flourishing. Each morning the Becky brings in a whole wagon load. Nights are nippy, so we know winter is just around the corner.
We finally finished harvesting the last of the culinary pumpkins and winter squash. Everything is now displayed at the farm store. The girls had a friend stop by and the three of them finished pruning and tying the last of the olallieberries. Late weeds were hand-pulled. The prunings were hauled up to the compost pile. We gave the berries a good long drink of water and they are settled in for the winter. This spring we will come back and dig up stray runners coming up during the center path of the rows. We lost several plants due to gophers, and will use these volunteer starts to replenish the plants.
We spent afternoons mid-week raking leaves. The large stately oak tree behind the farm store gently showers us with leaves. Raking leaves is a never ending job, but even so is satisfying. The leaves waft down gently in the breeze and make you feel as if you are part of an autumn postcard. The acorns are unusually heavy this year. I wonder if that means we are going to have a wet winter?
At long last all of the gourds have been harvested and the front field is full of bright orange bins filled with gourds. We sell freshly harvested green gourds at the farm store for fall decorating. They are mostly shades of bright green and white. We will haul them up to the barn in a few days where they will be placed on pallets to dry over the winter. Once dried they are tan in color, and are usually covered in black mold. This is all part of the normal drying process. Once dried, the mold and outer layer of skin is removed with a scrubbing pad and water. Underneath will be an attractive natural wood-like surface. We sell cured gourds to crafters and artists to make bird houses, musical instruments, vases, ornaments, etc.
Friday the girls put the forks on the skip-and-drag. They used it to load picnic tables two at a time and haul them up to the barn to protect them from our heavy winter rains. Next spring we will haul them back down, for another summer and fall season. We have nine picnic tables in all, they are heavy and a bit unwieldy, so it took several trips. One more task accomplished! Next we stacked all the outdoor chairs and banquet tables so they too can be stored away safe for the winter.
Saturday the farm store was busy. After I finished baking two different kinds of cookies in our farm kitchen, the girls took care of customers while I worked on cleaning our storage container so all our assorted picnic table umbrellas, scarecrows, lanterns, etc. could be packed away.
We headed up to the barn to store gourds on Sunday, and realized we needed to do some serious housecleaning in the barn first. We moved a lot of lumber and reorganized the several different bays so we would have room to properly dry our gourds. We had some ground squirrels discover our cache of dried gourds, and they probably destroyed at least 200 gourds, probably about a $1000 loss. It was so sad! We took all the empty damaged shells over to the compost pile. Looking at the bright side, we should have some great compost next summer!
Today I’m getting the website up-dated, and trying to catch up on paperwork while the girls run the farm store. I’ll try to get some pictures up-loaded soon so you can see the seasons un-fold on our farm.
Joy
