Posts from, or about, our home.
I wish he’d clean his plate.
A fruity surprise.
About a decade ago, we cleared brush between the house and the road, and planted a set of young trees in their place. Last week, after long forgetting, we realized that – among the trees planted – was a pear tree. And, more impressively, there were several dozen, nearly ripe pears! Here are a few:
They’re quite tasty. Soon they will all be ripe. Time to make pear compote, pear crisp, pear sauce, and more…
The fruits of our labor.
After the kids picked a huge basket of apples, I turned them into applesauce this past weekend. It took a while to peel all those apples but, yum! the result is mighty tasty.
I used this recipe (double batch).
Apple pickin’ time.
We planted a couple apple trees about 20 years ago, and they’ve finally born a real bounty of fruit! It was tricky to pick them so Andy and Mara climbed into the tree and shook the branches until all the apples fell!
Time to make applesauce…
Equal day and night.
Today (22 September) is the fall equinox – when we have equal amounts of the day with sun and no sun. The length of the day is changing fast – indeed, faster than any other time of the year except spring equinox – and it is really noticeable every day. Today was rather cloudy, not a great day for solar power:
Harvest time!
One of the great treats of September is the arrival of raspberry season. Pam’s raspberry patch, tended and cultivated now for almost twenty years, is bursting forth with berries. We pick and freeze a a pint or two every day!
They’re remarkably hardy, and will tend to keep producing after the first frost or two. We’ll be enjoying them fresh for the rest of the month, and frozen for the rest of the winter.
Completed this week!
Andy and Pam finished their project, started last summer, to build a pizza oven beside the patio. It looks great – and bakes great pizza!
The final touches include a bluestone counter all the way around, a tile trim under that counter, a brick archway for the wood storage underneath, and a finish coat of paint top and bottom.
Life skills.
One of the most useful skills I learned while a student at Dartmouth had nothing to do with academics, or computer science. It was how to use a chainsaw (safely) to fell trees and turn them into firewood – or a water bar, a bridge, or a cabin. To this day, I still find it satisfying to pull out my aging Stihl for an afternoon of hard work. This weekend we removed a few small crabapple and black locust trees from our property, where they had outgrown their location, and turned them into firewood. Many kudos to Andy and Mara, now able to wield the saw themselves, and to Pam for the instigation and for a lot of the hard work to move all the debris. We’ll all be that much toastier when winter arrives.
I found this little guy monitoring the charge port on my Tesla. (see 10s video)
An annual treat.
I’m delighted to be back in the Upper Valley region of NH & VT in time for strawberry season. We are fortunate to have an excellent organic farm nearby, Cedar Circle Farm, just up the river on the Vermont side. So yesterday morning you could find me out in their U-pick field before the sweltering summer weather arrived – quickly filling a six-quart tray with the best, ripest strawberries. I filled one tray with Jewel berries, suitable for freezing, and another quart with AC Valley Sunset berries, with plans to eat them within one or two days 🙂
The result was delish – strawberry shortcake for dinner dessert.
David Kotz 