Fall Harvest

Bob is enjoying his time at home once again. He really didn't get to garden this past summer like he enjoys, but he did manage to plant a rather large garden and it has been very plentiful. This week Bob has been busy getting ready for evangelistic meetings that start tomorrow night. He is the speaker and will be using power-point for his presentations. This is new to Bob so he is at the church tonight with a computer guru to make sure everything is working properly. Not only has Bob been preparing for this three weeks series of meetings, he has spent some time getting the house and yard ready for winter. He won't be able to get everything done that should be done, but he'll get most of the "have-to's" done.

Today Bob replaced several of the chimney blocks and smoke stack. The old ones had deteriorated and we would have never made it through the winter without problems. He also dug potatoes and beets and brought in the pumpkins, gourds, buttercup winter squash, and spaghetti squash. Tomorrow he will put most of these in the root cellar to use during the winter months.

Bob also picked several baskets full of concord grapes. Tomorrow I'll make some grape juice and grape jelly. I'm also going to make more applesauce. Tonight I went to a women's Bible study class and one of the ladies had brought homemade applesauce. I took a small bowl of it to taste, and it was so good I had to find out her secret. She said that she cooked the apples with a little raspberry/apple frozen concentrated juice and then added raspberries. After it had all cooked down, she mashed it. She didn't add any sweetener of any kind and it was wonderful! I'm going to make some like that tomorrow using some of the raspberries I froze last Friday from our berry patch. Oh, the color of the applesauce was a beautiful pink. There were also homemade pumpkin muffins at the class and I ate more than I should have. They were the miniature muffins, so taking two or three didn't look to much like a pig.

After the Bible class we worked on stained glass candle holders. I'm really happy with the way mine turned out. The instructor took them home to grout them for us and will bring them back to our next class. I took my camera to the class, but forgot to take the chip from the computer so I don't have any pictures of the class.

A bucket of potatoes and a bucket of beets.


A wheel barrel full of red potatoes. Dirt and all!

Bob stills has to dig the Yukon Gold and russets.

A big pile of pumpkins, gourds, buttercup squash, and spaghetti squash.

Another pile of pumpkins and squash.

Here are the grapes Bob picked from our vineyard. We'll make juice tomorrow and maybe jelly. Sometimes I freeze the pulp after making the juice and make the jelly at a later time. I'm not sure what I'll do tomorrow. It's nice to take out a bag of grape pulp and make jelly. It sure doesn't take very long when it's pre-measured and frozen.