September in the garden

Oh, harvest time. How I love you and mourn you. The end of summer but so much yumminess. Photos include:

• Pantone tomato ripeness scale
• Sunflower eating the sky
• All the grapes: Interlaken are not super productive but each grape is the season distilled to perfection: high summer sweetness enrobed in the crisp bite of fall
• Marigolds doing their golden thing, all season long
• Beans going strong but their leaves are turning yellow
• Huckleberries — what do I do with them? I need a bear!
• Winter squash to remind me that this season won’t last either…

Colors of late October

Been putting the garden to bed for the winter, but there’s still a bit of color left, here and there. Reds and yellows turning to brown, but still lots of green. Especially the kale. I suspect nothing will kill the kale.

The apple was from the last day of the farmers’ market near me. I’ve never eaten a pink-fleshed apple before. Of course I promptly forgot the name, but it’s crisp and fairly sweet with a bit of dryness. Quite tasty in salad.

I also ate a strawberry and a raspberry from the garden. Silly fruits, there’s not enough sunlight to make sugar. Go to sleep and I’ll see you in the spring.

Fall officially here

An equinox. A full moon. Jupiter very close, close enough apparently to see its four moons through binoculars (although I have to try that again tonight; that full moon is very bright).

And XY brought me a His Bakery Cloud Nine cake as payment for services rendered.

All these cosmological portents… and I always like to think those messages are aimed right at me. What should I learn from them?

I think I’m supposed to look outward, look upward, think universally.

Buttercream frosting makes me philosophical.

An ahhh and an argh

This morning, the sun has slanted in such a way that the back porch no longer gets sunlight for my breakfast.  Argh!  But I stayed home from work today (I don’t have a car for the day — how often do brakes and rotors need to be changed anyway? — and I’m too chicken to bicycle on the busy roads) so I’m going to have a brunch on the back porch when the sun moves farther along. 

One of the few — okay, only — perks of being self-employed (the dangers being poverty, poverty and poverty) is the ability to NOT go to work one day.  Yes, this increases the risk of poverty, poverty and poverty, but I will get more of my other work done, my writing work. 

And I get a little taste of what it’ll be like, maybe, someday, when I can write full time.  That’s my dream.  That’s the ahhh.

Now, off to write.