Shifting Season

It is my favourite season of the year, and this one is as perfect as they get. Rain here and there, interspersed with warm sunny days. I can still forget to bring a jacket when I leave the house, and get away with it. I still don’t need to switch from summer shoes to boots. But I no longer have to worry about whether it will cool enough to sleep at night, or how much we are spending to keep the AC running. It’s not running.

We are blessed with multiple fruit trees at our place in Tigard. There is a thriving apple tree that might be McIntosh by the colour? A thriving fig tree, which is a bit of a disappointment since I don’t like figs. But I am trying to make myself eat them and learn to like them, because my mother loved them. Right now, sliced fig on a cracker with a slice of sharp cheddar is a taste combination I can enjoy. We have an Asian Pear that was loaded with gorgeous fruits last year, but this year has only a few tiny, cracked, deformed things. I don’t know why. The neighbor’s Asian Pear is loaded with gorgeous fruit as ours was last year.

The squirrels eat apples. The chickens eat apples. We eat apples, and still we do not eat enough. They cover the ground and every couple of days I pick them all up and dump them somewhere: into the chicken pen, into the very back yard beneath the rhododendrons, into the compost bins. The rest, which is buckets and buckets and buckets, I dump into the yard waste bin and it is hauled off to contribute to city compost.

I have never owned a contraption like the one pictured above. Pedro and I spend a lot of time in second hand building supply stores, for our projects, but now also increasingly for the kids and their new home in Salem (closing is September 22, and they get to move in October 16th). I was looking for something else but spotted the apple corer/slicer and bought it for $3. It takes care of the entire apple in 2 seconds! Absolutely brilliant. My idea now is to cook down apples and freeze the sauce to use as compote or in muffins, or in pies this winter.

The above photos are for Lou, at Louis N. Carreras, Woodcarver blog. I commented that I have some volunteer squash that are hybrids and I can’t guess what they are a combination of. He suggested posting photos. So anyone: send me your guess. The ones above are pumpkin+what?

The spaghetti squash ones are on the kitchen counter right now, and it’s the 16th, so cooking duties for the second half of the month just switched to me. I am going to cook them and see what they taste like. The others are too pretty to cut up and they now adorn the front of the house.

Pedro’s hops plants are thriving. We planted them for looks. I love keeping a few of the hops around in the house, too, because they smell amazing. I love beer, and I especially love hoppy beer, and you can smell it when you hold the hops up to your nose.

The sunflowers are diligently planted by the squirrels. We had much fewer sunflowers this year and also this is the first summer with a new family at the house next to the garden. I am now wondering if the other family there put out sunflower seeds for the squirrels, and the new people do not? In any case, our garden is always filled with sunflowers, which are a mess and get in the way of everything, but they are so beautiful that Pedro and I leave a good many of them to grow anyway.

I think those are most of my seasonally appropriate photos. I am in a happy September mood today and it might be because I love this season so much. I had fun bringing you into my golden-orange world.

Oh. There is one more photo.