1. plant something: Tulips and pansies. Still no garlic . . . every time we get ready to plant it, it rains.
2. harvest something: Eggs. Peppermint. A few leftover onions.
3. preserve something: Made pineapple sage jelly, which is earmarked for Christmas gifts. Canned several pints of turkey broth.
4. reduce waste: The usual: recycling (plastic, cat food cans, milk jugs). Continuing to use clothesline instead of dryer. Using mail waste and cutdown cardboard boxes as firestarters. I was offered the bones from the turkey at John's family dinner, but I didn't have room to do anything with them, so I passed this year.
5. preparation and storage: Nice big stack of wood on porch, and more up at Bob's ready to saw and split. (Never turn down free wood.) Stocked up on sweet potatoes, chicken broth, canned baby green peas, evaporated milk. (Grocery store sales.) Bought a five-pound bag of baking cocoa. More dried beans, oatmeal, raisins, dried apricots. Several jars of local molasses. Replenished stocks of flour, sugar, cat food.
6. build community food systems: Not lately, I'm afraid. Though we are sharing potatoes and eggs with one of the neighbors.
7. eat the food: Homemade bread, as always. Don't remember anything else specific—we didn't cook over Thanksgiving, so there are no leftovers. But we did cook a turkey the week before, and had turkey broth, turkey sandwiches, turkey casserole . . . . Lots of eggs, since the farmer's market replaced ours with someone else's, and now only takes 6 dozen or so a week. (And, of course, ours are laying nicely now, after weeks of nothing . . . ) Fortunately, we're both fond of breakfast-for-supper and deviled eggs, and just plain boiled eggs. Applesauce cake from homecanned applesauce. John's homemade beef jerky. Mashed sweet potatoes (our contribution to Thanksgiving dinner), which later became a pie. A nice big pot of chili, which we ate for several days and fed the last little bit to the chickens, who were highly appreciative.
Notes: We're still not up to par from the flu—neither of us feels like doing much, so we haven't been. It's good to have things in the pantry . . . and John's brother-in-law shot a deer for us this past weekend when he went hunting down in Vance County. It's not a big one, and we still have deer shoulder and round steaks from last year in the freezer, so I think we'll get a piece of beef with a fair amount of fat on it and grind them together to make sausage, and freeze it in packs of half-a-dozen patties. And maybe make some more jerky, too. I splurged last week and bought enough ground beef to make a bunch of hamburger patties—we ate two for supper the other night and the rest are in the refrigerator for lunches—and a pound of sandwich ham (on sale) and sliced cheese; we're both tired of cooking and wanted a change.
Other than that, what have we done lately? Not much. Cleaned up a bit in the yard, but it's still so warm things aren't dying back yet, and I hate to cut down the flower/weed seed heads until January or so to give the birds a chance to eat what they want. The peppermint has come back up, and the pineapple sage—from which I carefully picked all the leaves before the freezing night we had a couple of weeks ago—has leafed out again. Tulips are peeking up. Not good. It's forecast to get down in the twenties by the weekend, so we shall see what happens to everything then.
Found out what has been happening to the chickens (we've lost half the flock this year!)—John shot two big male raccoons and a big opossum. One raccoon caught in the act, and the other two trying to be. All is quiet now, so far, though we are down to only three dozen or so chickens; hardly enough to sell eggs, but more than we need to supply ourselves. (The feed bill is lower, though . . . ) I hated to kill them, but this is not a cafeteria.
We acquired a turkey yesterday—one of them kept flying over the garden fence and wandering around in the yard. John chased it back a couple of times, then it went up the road to the neighhbors, who called us to come and get it; after taking stock, we discovered that all *our* turkeys were accounted for, and this was apparently an escaped one (possibly from up the road) who had come visiting. So we clipped her wings and put her in the garden with the other turkeys, and we'll see what happens.
Many squirrels in the yard. Many blue jays, titmice, chickadees . . . cardinals and bluebirds are mostly in the woods still, and the goldfinches are busy eating goldenrd seed and haven't come to the feeders yet. We have what is apparently a family group of mockingbirds (there are three together, and they're fiercely territorial, so I presume they are related) who come to the weeping cherry sometimes. There's a flock of eight or ten doves that come in and eat the seed the squirrels spill from the feeders. I saw the pileated woodpecker in the side yard last week, working on a tree about twenty feet from the house. And the hairy woodpecker (the black and white one with the bloodred cap and throat, not the little downy with only a red cap) has taken to hanging upside down on the pokeberry bush outside my window, dangling from the tip of a spray of berries and gobbling his way up.
I've been working on gifts—I have all the raw materials in The Stash; now to get them done. And there is the giant pile of goodwill and book-sale books, from which I shall choose several to give away. I am buying a couple of things, but only a couple. Adults get bread-and-jam baskets, children get [mostly] what I can make, and a few books. We have a tree—a lovely symmetrical three-foot one, which will sit on the round table so as to be out of the cats' reach (no sense in putting temptation right down in their faces), and which cost a mere $10 at the produce stand (and which I will get back on Thursday, when I sell David his weekly bread order). It's currently residing in a bucket of water on the side porch; we'll put it up (well, technically *I* will put it up; John only hauls the box of ornaments down from the attic) on Yule, probably. That way I can leave it up until Twelfth Night, so I can enjoy it after all the hoorah has died down.
So. There you are. Not much going on here, which is fine with me. I got a clean bill of health at the dentist last week; that appoitnment, plus renewing various magazine subscriptions—which all seem to come due t once—is why we're seriously broke this month. (But at least the $140 set of xrays can be put off until the next appointment.) But we have plenty of food for all and sundry and wood for the stove, I have a scarf in the works, and directions for another one I want to make as soon as I get down to the yarn store to buy three skeins of wool, and I have borrowed Edwin Way Teale's Circle of the Seasons from Mom (I had to promise to bring it back within a month; she didn't want to part with it. She knows me.), AND I am next on the list for Artisan Bread in Five Minutes at the library . . .
This was a couple of days after I'd planted them, a week or so ago. They've filled out considerably since them, with more blooms; I'm enjoying them a great deal.
