September's Abundance

It seems its been awhile.


We often forget about time in the traditional sense of it around here. I find a great satisfaction in keeping track of the days only by our Saturday Farmers Market. The days have been reliably hot and the nights expectedly cool, the preferred comfort zone for our pampered plants. As the calendar officially reminds us of falls arrival, the garden reminds us in its own subtle ways. The scraggly tiered vines of the melon beds are cleared away, the tall brown stalks of corn rustle their brittle leaves in the afternoon breeze, the basil plants fight our efforts to keep from flowering despite our insistence for prolonged pesto indulgence, deserving their complete life cycle like all else, and the winter squash rally in growth to such ridiculous size as to cause concern as to how in the hell to cook it. Shannna also prepares for the coming winter months and the ailments that ensue with turning her beloved herbs into wonderful homemade medicinals (yes, the legal ones) keeping our health and mojo at optimum levels.

Its a time of transition as beds of summer loving plants are replaced with those that will thrive through fall and some of the hardier specimens even over winter such as our new beds of brassicas...This is one of our favorite aspects of this area...year round growing conditions.

And as the season cycles carry out their transitions, Shanna and I find ourselves faced with our own. As our informal tenure is coming to a close here on the farm we look forward to ponder the various prospects of the future. We count our blessings every day that they all remain incredibly good prospects. Life has been good to us and we only hope it feels the same of us. With that, we both know that wherever we end up next will be the right place, because we are there together.I know...fluffy, sappy, romanticism...you're just jealous...so there!

Its not all introverted, melodramatic decision making though...its been an incredibly social month for us with many good friends visiting that included a very merry unbirthday to us...some bicep blasting workouts of apple cider pressing (notice the sheer power of muscle and focus here)...as well as some large scale canning efforts giving us loads of awesome food through the colder months ahead. We also made a trip to Tahoe for re-calibration with more friends, nature and the often elusive act of fun. It seems when one spends enough time hunched over a spade or on bended knees scratching in the dirt, ones muscles often forget how to bend the neck and back up and outward to the macro world around us... Tahoe is always great for that as its level of beauty is on such a ridiculously large scale that it leaves you in an outward stooper of awe.

Its getting slow around town with the hordes of weekend warrior winos becoming less, making for a mellow wake-n-bake like pace around town...on second thought, its probably not just the lack of tourists responsible for this. The off season of any tourist destination can seem hard on the pockets but heaven on the soul for the hard working residents. Luckily, we work for free so we don't have to worry about that. We are rich in other ways, better ways...imagine if the preferred currency for global trade were tomatoes and green beans...we would be rich and those fed chairman and executive officers wouldn't look like such wretched, soulless zombies. Perhaps they'll consider it when they realize no amount of soy sauce can make their money edible.

Anyways, its been a fun ride with more learning than my neuron receptors will probably be able to handle. Maybe its just a part of turning thirty but it seems that for every new thing I learn, something else gets forgotten. Limited RAM on the older models, I guess. But its the current stuff that matters most. The world is a whirlwind of madness right now and its up to us to build us's and better ways of doing things and break the chains of the collective comatose.
Rise and Shine beautiful people.