"The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land."
-Abraham Lincoln

A Season of Harvest

Have I mentioned yet that I love fall?  I hate winter but I LOVE fall.  The weather is wonderful, the colors are fantastic and, of course, it's harvest time! This is the time when all that hard work really starts to pay off.  Sweet corn, popcorn, Indian corn, tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, gourds, apples, cabbage, heck we even have watermelons still coming up and ripening for us.  Yep, it's an all around pleasant time of year. 

The picture above is some of our popcorn this year.  We set it out at our pumpkin stand with the plan to take store and eventually eat any of it that doesn't sell.  Given modern society's woefully poor appreciation for the joys and usefullness of Indian corn and homegrown popcorn, I think there will probably be plenty left over for us.  With the type of summer we had this year I was very pleased to see how well the Indian corn and the popcorn colored up. 

I've been bringing in tomatoes and watermelons from the garden almost daily this last week.  The kiddos are loving the watemelons.  I grew the smaller, "personal" sized watermelons this year and it's turned out really nicely.  We can generally slice up and eat one whole watermelon between the six of us in one night without any leftover to take up space in the fridge.  

The kids have been having a blast making drums out of last year's dried gourds.  We took one of our smaller round dried gourds, cut it in half and cleaned it all out and made a rubber mallet out of one of a larger sized bouncy ball, some super glue and a dowel cut down to size.   Then the kids put the gourds into a basin of water, cut side down, and they drum away.  This is definitely a project for everyone with kids to try, it's easy and fun and the sound will surprise both you and them.  

Even the chickens that we bought this summer are getting in on the action by laying their first eggs (2 weeks early)!  It was a pleasant surprise to find them already laying fairly large for first timers, beautful brown eggs. 

I sincerely hope your fall has been a blessed one so far, as well.  :)