Cold Feels Good

We planned an outside service and church picnic for yesterday morning. Our pastor said that if he had known it would bring rain, he would have scheduled it earlier in the summer. We were under a pavilion at the local fish hatchery, so we stayed dry, but it was in the 50s for most of the morning. And this will only make sense to people who don’t do well in the heat, but it felt wonderful to be cold enough that I had to put on warm clothes.

[Hardy folks, we Montanans. We picnic in all kinds of weather.]

The rain will help the garden, but we also had some thunderstorms. We’ll have to see if there are lightning strike fires that flare up this week when it gets back into the 90s again. Ugh.

I got a giggle out of this yesterday morning:

The husband had set up some sawhorses with lumber on top earlier in the week. I called him over to show him and said that the turkeys were grateful for the rain shelter he had built for them. He said if he had known, he would have thrown a tarp over it, too.

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Saturday morning was overcast and blissfully cool, so I spent the whole morning out in the garden. The first order of business was to cut out all the spent raspberry canes. I usually do this in the spring, but there is no reason it can’t be done in the fall. I am trying to beat back the raspberry patch to a manageable size and get the thorny variety out of there in favor of the thornless one. Fortunately, the thornless one is more vigorous and it has taken over much of the patch.

I also need to evict some ground squirrels:

I wasn’t planning on digging up potatoes yet, but I am not going to leave them for the rodents to snack on. I may have to camp out there with the .22 for a few days.

I hope the cucumber vines are close to being done producing. I think I’ve hauled in almost two hundred pounds of cukes this summer. Half of what I brought in on Saturday turned into these:

They are curry pickle slices, which is a recipe from one of my canning books. I tasted some before I canned them and they were pretty good. We’ll see how they taste after a month.

The gooseberries are ripe and I got enough to make a pie for the husband. His grandmother used to make gooseberry pies when he was growing up. I don’t know that mine is as good, but I was happy to use the fruit. I also pruned out some of the branches, similar to what I did with the currants.

I transplanted another row of lettuce seedlings. The first row bolted and is about to go to seed, which I will let it do so that lettuce comes up in that spot again next spring. And I have tiny seedlings coming up in a second tray in the greenhouse. This may be the year that I finally master succession planting.

Right now, the garden is at that stage of cleanup where it looks worse than when I started, but if I can get the canes piled up in an appropriate spot and do a bit of raking, it should look nice for the garden tour.

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With all of that gardening and kitchen work on Saturday and the picnic yesterday, I did not have time to sew much besides the straps for a couple of aprons. I offered to make a garden-themed apron for the raffle gift basket for the garden tour. That fabric was pulled from the stash and is waiting to be cut out.

The cool weather made me realize, though, that I need to get started on some long-sleeve tops for the fall.