More hickory nuts and a wrong date.

Shelling nuts.  I have a lot to go!

Shelling these goes real slow!  Kind of zen-like though.  Maybe good for practicing mindfulness?

Saving the shells for possible use in smoking meat!  We gave these to my neighbor in the city, he likes to smoke stuff!

Cabbage, eggplant and summer squash (!!!) harvest.

The cabbage are not very big, but I still got more than I could use.  The eggplants were just because we got the seeds mixed up in the cabbage seeds.  Of course, summer squash, I mean it's almost November!  Wow!

Wrong weekend for the yard sale

We got the weekends mixed up with regard to when the "big yard sale weekend" was supposed to be held.  Partly because when we were out at TSC last weekend at a sidewalk/harvest sale, one of the vendors had signs up saying the Grease, steam and rust show was this weekend - which normally corresponds to the big yard sale weekend.  Anyway, the big yard sale weekend (and the grease, steam, and rust show) are NEXT weekend.

Katherine made some nice signs!  I placed them out by the entrance to our road.  Didn't get much traffic though.

Pinto beans, wildlife - the turtles and the bees?

Pinto Bean Harvest

The pinto beans were in a patch that was flooded and partially washed out, not to mention attacked by rabbits (and a groundhog, perhaps), and overgrown with weeds (I was able to cultivate it ONCE - it was too wet the rest of the time).  Anyway, I had to go in and pick what beans I could find.  I was able to harvest probably 8-10 lbs of beans!  Not bad considering the situation.

Filled in around porch

I moved and leveled the porch last weekend, but there were gaps around the house and base of the porch that I wanted to fill in with dirt.  This weekend I got a couple of front-end-loaders full of dirt and fill in a bit.

There was a hole on this side - in the corner next to the house, that I am pretty sure a groundhog had been using (or had plans to use) for a den.  I wanted to shut down such a bad idea.

European Hornets

I was in the kitchen when I noticed this guy on the kitchen screen door.  These guys are all over the pears and apples!  I need to figure out how to eradicate them!  They are eating a significant amount of fruit and they are quite disturbing.

They are about twice the size of a regular bald-faced hornet!  Thankfully, they seem to be relatively docile.

Turtles!

I caught these two doing this outside!  Such naughty turtles! LoL

More summer squash!

Yep, well into fall now - but the summer squash are doing fine!  Will this be the last harvest?   The plants are looking pretty rough...

Winter squash (buttercup) are doing fine

There some decent looking squash coming on.    Wouldn't have minded a few more - but maybe there are enough...

Confused Forsythia

I discovered a number of forsythia that were putting out blooms!  They normally bloom in the spring.  Weirdness.

Pinto bean picking continues

It goes slow with all these weeds!  Hard to even see the beans in there.

Wine is working! Various late harvest stuff

Wine

Not much going on this weekend.  The wine is fermenting well though!

More tomato gravy!

Didn't have enough to do anything else with, so I figured I would make some more gravy!  Yum!

Summer Squash, cabbage and eggplant harvesting

Just a quick shot of the harvest this weekend.

Cherry Trees Mulched

These trees are in rough shape.  The mulch seemed to help the blueberries a lot, so I will keep putting it down on the cherries too!  I am tempted to use some high Nitrogen fertilizer on these cherry trees next year.  They are old enough to tolerate it better and they sure could use something to get them to grow!

Kale crackers,

Kale Crackers!

I haven't gotten around to harvesting much kale this year and I felt bad about it.  So I went out to the raised bed and managed to salvage enough to make some Kale crackers!  The recipe is somewhere else on the blog here.  It's something like 3 cups of Kale puree, 1 C almonds, and 1/4 C nutritive yeast powder, salt, pepper, various spices to taste.  These turned out quite nicely!  There is always some variance in the moisture content of the Kale so there may be some tweaking involved to get the consistency correct.  I just spread this on silpat and dry/bake in oven at something like 250F - 300F.  Your choice of when to take them out depending on how crisp you like them.

Kale crackers bagged and ready to munch on!  

Canning more peaches

I picked these peaches off of the "packed" tree last week - it had more peaches than leaves I think! Anyway, I got around to canning them.  They were a little bit unripe - but good for canning.  Looks like 15 pints canned here.

Looks like about 15 pints canned here!

Not bad for one little tree!  This is the first real harvest from this tree too!

Squash, tomatoes, strawberries, and elderberries are still producing

The tomatoes were a bit of a disappointment this year, but that's ok.  I have plenty canned and freeze dried in storage!  In fact, I did not plant these for storage/preservation since we had so many.

Everbearing strawberries are still putting out some fruit!

Not a lot of them, but enough to flavor some fruit leather!

Grape harvest - whats left anyway

The deer and the racoons left me only about 6 lbs of grapes.  That's in total, all varieties included!  Buggers!  Next year there is going to be a fence around the grapes.  Maybe electric header too.  We will see.  Anyway, I picked what I had and mixed them all together to make about 1/2 gallon of wine.   It will probably be awful, but these grapes aren't much good for eating (they taste funky).

Total grape harvest for 2017!  All picked off them stems and ready to squish to make some wine.

Squished and in for the primary fermenting

Air-lock in place.  Now just wait for the grapes to render a bit more juice.  I believe I added some pectinase, but I can't remember.

Apples

I processed some of the Gala apples (and a few of the other apples from varieties that didnt produce many apples)  into applesauce and apple leather.

Didn't make a lot of applesauce, which is ok since I evidently don't eat a lot of applesauce (I still have over 12 quarts left over from canning it in previous years)

The Raspberry/apple leather may actually have some elderberry in it too, if I recall.

Hmm, I guess I didn't get any pictures of the blackberries (not raspberries, despite the label)