October Onwards

That rapid flurry of activity that heralds winter's imminent arrival is in full swing around these parts. Yesterday, after spending several hours doing schoolwork, I hauled my flintlocks outside and was a whirlwind of fall chorin'.

I dug the last of the taters, selected all of the biggest and bestest for winter storage, and placed all the small ones in a bucket for my latest small potato long term storage experiment.

What might that be? Well, every year I get at least a bucket full of small to mid-sized potatoes that are a PITA to deal with. They also spoil faster than the larger ones, even though I do cure them properly.

This year's experiment in small potato preservation is to boil them, skin on, puree them, spread them on parchment on my food dehydrator screens, dry them, break into to bark and store for long term food storage. I might even grind them into a powder and place them in a mason jar for powdered taters convenience reasons. It's always nice to have a thickener for soups and stews or a quick dinner option.

We shall see how this experiment progresses....

Fall baking season has been very enjoyed by the inhabitants of my farm, the hubs and the boy have been scarfing down the homemade breads, sourdough discard cookie bars, and fermented pizza crusts with aplomb. I am just happy to not be baking like a crazy lady on steroids and more at just my regular crazy lady level again.

Firewood splitting and stacking is progressing, and for the last couple days we have had a visitor around the place while we do that and other chores.

A couple weeks ago Mama and baby moose dropped by. Mama moose has been lurking about here for years, and has raised countless offspring in the vicinity.

Well, I think Nature might have finally claimed Mama, because baby has been chilling by the house for the past couple of days, and Mama is nowhere in sight. This development has made us pretty sad. Baby is last year's model, so I am hoping she is big enough to survive the coming winter. I'm hedging that hope by not being mad about her eating ALL of my roses and rose hips, in fact, I welcomed it!

Today, I need to write a pretty massive theory paper before heading out to stack wood. To be honest, after spending the last three days at Mach Four Chore Galore speed, I am a bit meh about doing anything, so I think I am going to switch it up a bit and finish the minor paper I was going to do tomorrow and just format the gigantic paper so that I can tear into composition mode tomorrow.

The winding down of this year has brought about some surprises in our life that I will probably get around to sharing on here eventually. Suffice it to say that I am a bit pensive today, mainly because of all the angst that is floating about in the existential ether. The world is definitely a groaning, yet the practice and art of living still has to be conducted daily, and I guess I better get to it!

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And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's not in the possession of developing carpal tunnel and moderately sore glute muscles iPhone.

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