Fall Updates & More

We've had a much milder fall than normal so far, but cooler days are coming.  This morning was our first frost warning though we had none here, but a few more chances are coming soon.  I'm writing this on Monday but I think I'll set this to post on Tuesday, just to put a day between this and the Ace stuff.

My wife cleaned up the stump area on Saturday leaving only the wildflowers that were still blooming, a couple red ones, one cone flower plant, and there are still small yellow ones that appear from time to time.  We also got the new bushes caged for winter so the rabbits don't eat them down to the nubs like they did last winter.  Hopefully by the end of next summer they'll be big and strong enough that we won't have to do this again.

I spent 4 hours on Saturday morning making baguette, and 4 hours on Saturday afternoon/evening making loaded baked potato dinner rolls to go with steak for dinner.  Another King Arthur recipe, which is my first stop when looking for something different to make.

My wife thought I was just making potato dinner rolls, so this was a tasty surprise seeing all that went into these.  They were a lot of effort for only a small pan of rolls, but they're so very good.  So good that these will definitely be made again in the future.

On a side note, I also made my first batch of homemade taco sauce.  It seems to have turned out well, and we'll have tacos later in the week to verify.  But another thing that we have everything in the cupboard to make, so why the heck not?

After all that on Saturday I took Sunday almost completely off, except for making the taco sauce mentioned above.  But today I looked at the forecast (cold and rainy tomorrow) and so I went out after work to do some of things I had planned on doing yesterday.  First off, I cut up all the sunflower stalks.  There is only the one sunflower left out front by the bird feeder and I may leave that for some time yet until it is completely dead.  

Once the stalks dry out completely there's not much to them, but they'll be easy to light and will make good kindling.  The root balls I separated into another bucket.  Those I may just run to the dump as yard waste to get rid of them.  I like to keep organic waste right here and compost it, but sometimes it's just got to go.  And as you can see the gardens have been cleaned up, mostly.  The two parsleys will be removed when it is time to plant garlic in that garden, yet this fall.

We've been pretty windy lately so I had to pick up some sticks today, which I would normally put in the fire pit but realized the pit needed cleaning out, so I got that done, too.  Ready for a fire now, whenever the wind dies down and I have that energy.

The calendar has me itching to clean up everything for winter, but the mild weather has stretched that timeline quite a bit this year.  I'm not going to complain, once winter gets here it will drag on seemingly forever, then we'll happily do it all over again come spring.