Tuesday Afternoon....

Princess looked outside and yelled out "Mama, it's snowing!"
I saw this....

a few minutes later, I looked up and saw this....



My trees (including our beloved fig tree) were almost to the ground with heavy wet snow.


By bed time almost all of the snow was gone due to the freezing rain.
Baby, it's cold outside.

I'm glad we got that little hoop house built last week. The wind blew the "doorway"
of it open today, but it was still much warmer than outside.

Sunday morning in the garden

It was lovely.It was a bit cold, but lovely.
The compost was steaming.


I got a few minutes all by myself to enjoy the quiet of the morning before Farmer Dad
found me. The beauty of the colder weather, no machine noises from the neighbors.
I picked a couple of red raspberries...Mmmm.

Looking up at the morning sun warming up the plum trees.

Mustard greens




Leaves are just flying everywhere...

Looking up through the trees...

Mid day on a cloudy Saturday.



As Autumn moves in, the view is ever changing.







Looking out over the house...




Farmer Dad did a bit of cleaning up around the pear trees in
the rear of the garden.

Baby it's cold outside....

Autumn is a lovely time to live in the Garden State.
There are festivals and pumpkin patches, corn mazes
and hay rides, haunted graveyard tours and haunted mansions.
Apple picking and cider donuts.
The air is crisp and the skies tend to be blue.The air gets colder.
Our garden is put to bed for the most part, although we will try a little gardening
through the winter this year in the mini greenhouse we built.
Right now it is waiting to have something planted inside.
Until then it holds some potted plants.I am not sure how long it will last,
but all experiments lead somewhere.Living a sustainable life is our goal.
I have not put a lot of energy into this blog, most of my time gets devoted to my daughter,
and the blog I maintain about our experiences homeschooling, but I will aim to do better
here in the future.

Preparing for our first frost...

We are expecting the first frost tonight, so we
set up a little tunnel to garden under for the winter.
I had previously purchased this tunnel frame from Gardener's Supply Company,
but Farmer Dad would never use them..claimed they wouldn't work.


We no longer had the cloth that went with them, but we had some "survive the millennium plastic",
from my Grandfather, so we used that.
Farmer Dad had some wood, so he stapled the plastic to that.

Then we brought one of the hay bales from the front porch decor around back
and after cleaning off the ground inside
we spread it around inside.
It made it very warm inside.




We put the potted plants inside for the time being. Some will come into the house, some will go
into our mini greenhouse, but that needs a new bottom so it is more level and I need to make room inside.



We spread the remainder of the hay around the outside.
I also covered the remaining tomato plant (not sure what it is, it was a volunteer
that we moved to this spot after the peas were done) with Princess's soccer goal
and an old piece of fabric I picked up on freecycle.


It is not pretty, but hopefully it will allow it to ripen the tomatoes left on it.

I plan to start lettuce, beets and a couple other things under the hoop,
but for tonight, the potted plants will survive...I hope.

A little Autumn Clean- up

Here we are at mid-October...the 3 long rows of tomatoes needed
cleaning up. I did not keep track of how many pounds of tomatoes the garden
produced, but it was a lot. I have many jars (see..not so good at keeping numbers)
of gravy and whole tomatoes and ketchup and salsa put up.
Here are Princess and Farmer Dad doing the work..




Princess harvested some carrots...

They found a forgotten pear hanging on the back pear tree.

Here are some shots of the cleared space

We still have a tomato growing on the other end of the garden,
along with the peppers (jalepenos,Anaheim and bell peppers-yellow and red)some swiss chard, mustard greens,and carrots.