Season's End

It is always a little bittersweet to get to this part of the fall, when I put the garden to bed, put away the outdoor furniture and fountain, and start cleaning the house to prepare for a long winter stuck inside. (I do a "fall cleaning" blitz rather than a spring one, usually.)

On the one hand, it is something of a relief to have one less thing on my plate--and the garden is a fair amount of work. On the other, it provides a bit of therapy and lots of lovely fresh veggies, which I'll miss. Still, this part of the year always rolls around, and here we are again.

Two weekends ago, my sainted friend Ellen (who will work for veggies and beer, bless her) helped me tear out the rest of the garden and put it to bed for the winter. I just left the basil (since we have been having a run of unusually warm weather, and I hadn't made the second batch of pesto yet). All I have left to do now is cover the beds with straw and pull the pump from the new pond.

Ellen taking down the last of the tomato cages.

An amphibian supervisor next to the asparagus bed.

It seems so empty now. The greenery you see is outside the garden. And mostly weeds.

Then I spent much of this last weekend putting up the last of the harvest, turning my bounty of golden delicious apples into applesauce (they're not really the perfect apple for that, being a bit too sweet, but they're ugly little organic apples and aren't great for eating out of hand) and much of the remaining basil into pesto. Everything that's left will probably die in the frost we're expecting tonight, but I've left it for the bees for now.

Basil!

Apples!

Applesauce prep. Thankfully, the slow cooker makes applesauce cooking a lot easier than it used to be.

Mystic supervised me in the kitchen.

Magic supervised me as I prepped the basil in front of the TV. It takes a long time.

Pesto ingredients. The flavored sea salt has citrus in it, made by my friend Chris. The garlic is from my garden too.

A fraction of what I ended up with. Pretty, isn't it?

I also had a visit the weekend before last from my pal Princess Alethea Kontis and her friend Lillie (Alethea lives in Florida, but was in the area visiting Lillie), which was lots of fun, and then a brief drive-by visit this last Sunday from pal Karen Buys as she drove from Bouchercon in Ontario back to her home in New Jersey. She brought me chocolate. Really good chocolate.

Princess Alethea!

Plus, I got to spend an unexpected three hours with Magic the Cat at the emergency vet on Saturday morning (we at least got to see her regular vet, who happened to be working, and it looks like it was nothing major), although I still managed to make a dump run with a borrowed truck-and-strong-guy to clear out the barn. YAY!

What have you done these last couple of weekends to celebrate the season's end?