Beautiful Apples

Forty quarts of salsa later, I am done with tomatoes for the season. A cold front is supposed to come through this afternoon and we are under a freeze watch for tonight. It’s hard to tell what will happen; cold air sinks, and sometimes the valley will get colder temperatures than we will up here on the side of the mountain. We can’t put off a killing frost forever, though.

While I was waiting on salsa to finish processing yesterday, I cleaned off the Honeycrisp and Red Wealthy trees. As with the Lodi apples, there was almost no bug damage. I found one apple that had a hole in it with a ladybeetle inside eating lunch. That was it. Our apples look as nice as—or better than—the Honeycrisps I get at the store:

The husband will snack on these over the next several weeks.

I am fussy about apples. The modern commercial varieties, like Honeycrisps, are too sweet. (Honeycrisps do keep well, however.) I prefer apples that taste more like the ones I ate when I was growing up. The closest I’ve found are Macintosh and Cortland, and now I have those trees in my orchard. State Fair is another one I like. That’s the advantage of growing your own food. You get to choose what you like.

I went up to the church around 3 pm to help with cleanup from the craft co-op sale. I think it helps to have someone from the congregation there (me) who knows where things go. Breaking down the sale goes much faster than setting it up, and we were done within two hours. Sarah and I chatted for a bit about the sale and she said thought it had gone very well. I would very much like to make enough product this winter to participate in next year’s sale, but I’ll have to see how things play out. I have to get my schedule under control.

I am feeling the need to pull back from a lot of my activities because people have a tendency to treat me as an unpaid personal assistant/therapist. I spend an awful lot of my time and energy maintaining boundaries and dealing with personalities and that has been exhausting lately. What is going to happen is that I am going to absent myself for a while and people will have to figure out how to solve problems without always running to me for answers.

I’m not exaggerating; you can ask the husband because he has been witness to a lot of this nonsense. He teases me that I must have been sent to the penal colony of Earth because I committed a crime on some distant planet.

When our former pastor retired two years ago, he resigned from all his volunteer activities and said that after one year, he would reassess and decide which ones to become involved with again. I note that he has not rejoined many of those organizations. I don’t blame him one bit. I suspect he is enjoying some newfound freedom. That was a brilliant strategy and one I find very attractive.

I am going to sew all day tomorrow. I may also turn off my phone.