A Long-Winded Post About A Busy Day

A good day, a busy day, and I'm gonna take some Arnica to ease the slight ouchy-ache in my lower back!

This morning we were forewarned of more rain to come this late afternoon (and it came) so we went outside first thing to do what had to be done.

We had a big pile of split wood that needed to be stacked in our smaller wood shed so Papa Pea and I did that in two separate sessions.  Got it all safe and dry (or I should say drying) in the wood shed and the mess of wood debris on the ground cleaned up.

My onions were overdue for pulling and being laid out to dry.  It's best if you harvest them after a dry spell, but that's something we haven't seen in quite some time.  So today I decided they had to come out, before the predicted couple days of rain, and harvested them all and with Papa Pea's help got them laid out on racks to begin their drying period.  Lotsa big, beautiful onions this year.

Then my better half gathered a lot of old hay to spread in the poultry yard area right in front of the birds' various shelters.  They still have much green area to roam in but that area where their little feet traverse back and forth to the small enclosures had gotten muddy from the frequent rains.  Now it's carpeted with fresh cover and maybe the eggs will be coming in cleaner.  I can hope. 

I keep the runners cut off my strawberry plants (which are long done bearing now) because I believe it allows the strength to remain in the mother plants and besides that, I prefer to keep three straight rows of plants rather than one big matted patch.  Although the ground was still plenty damp and even muddy in spots, I crawled along snipping off all the vigorous runners the plants have been sending out.  I had two five-gallon pails full of them!

We were offered the opportunity to come harvest as many Concord grapes from an acquaintance's grape arbor as we wanted.  This is the lovely bunch that I was going to use for grape jam which we both like.  But the more I thought about it, I decided that wouldn't be the best use of the grapes.  We've truly been cutting down the amount of jam we eat and since I have a good supply of both strawberry and haskap berry jam, I nixed that idea. 

Lucky me, our daughter offered to take the grapes and make juice for all of us.  Great!  However, when she did some research (takes after her father), she found that for best flavor Concord grapes shouldn't be harvested until after a first frost.  Ooops.  Well, now we know and the folks we got the grapes from said we were welcome to come back and take as many as we wanted.  So methinks we'll be waiting around for that first frost and maybe we can talk our daughter into more juice . . . or wine?!  Although I'm not sure Concord grapes make the best wine.  Anybody know about this?

A couple of days ago we sampled some nice organic peaches that our Co-op had in stock.  They were tasty so Papa Pea suggested I buy a bunch to cut up and freeze for use in our smoothies or cottage cheese fruit salads this winter.

I did so, but they just haven't seemed quite ripe to me so I've had them sitting on the counter waiting for them to soften up a bit.  Day before yesterday I did about half of them but these six were still to be done. 

I've been watching them carefully but when I checked them out tonight, darned if one of them didn't have a great big ol' mold spot on it.  Eeeuuw!  Decision has been made to process and get them all in the freezer tonight. 

I saw this gorgeous autumnal fabric advertised on the Internet a short time ago and couldn't pass it up.  (It was on sale!)  I got enough for fall valances for our back enclosed porch and maybe an apron and some potholders.

The valance for the small window had been done and today I finished one for one of the three big windows.  I hope to finish the rest maybe tomorrow because rain is forecast for the whole day.  In the above pic you can see a smidge of the light green valances I have up for spring and summer.

A rainy, inside day tomorrow in which to look forward to sewing and catching up on inside things.  And giving my back some rest and rejuvenation!