October 25, 2014
Autumn around my neighborhood has just begun a full-tilt run toward changing colors. We still have had no hard frost and barely any hoar frost, though both are overdue. Today and tomorrow the temperature is supposed to hit eighty degrees, then gradually drop to a more seasonal normal over the rest of the week. We did have several days of showers/rain and temperatures in the fifties and low sixties a week or so ago.
The remains of both the backyard garden and side garden, along with the surrounding grass, have been turned into mulch for the gardens and they await a layer of compost from the compost barrel before their winter coat of straw, (next month’s “big ticket” item at my house.) I still need to get serious about the indoor garden and by mid November I’ll need to plant the garlic.
Halloween is next week. We don’t get trick-or-treaters around here. The churches and other local groups mostly handle that. I haven’t seen many notices for houses of horror, (honestly, I think some churches have sort of ruined that for a lot of people,) but area farmers still offer corn mazes – complete with ghouls and goblins, cider, homemade apple butter and something akin to old-fashioned hayrack rides. Mt. Vernon, a few miles from here, sponsors an apple butter festival this time of year, celebrating the event with demonstrations of traditional methods of making it in big copper pots that simmer for hours – along with selling the most delicious apple butter around.
All of this fairly screams, “Fall!” even when the weather doesn’t. So, with the scent of home made apple butter and the taste of home made cider lingering in my memory, I’m going to get this blog post up and take advantage of Mother Nature’s little weather prank to get some things done around the house and yard. Happy Halloween, everyone.
And if you can, send a donation to Doctors Without Borders or one of the other groups working in West Africa. The people of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are our fellow travelers in the journey. Right now, they could use a helping hand.
The Conflicted Doomer 
Yeah, when that epidemiologist you posted the other day, Osterholz?, said MSF/Doctors Without Borders should get a Nobel for their work, he wasn’t kidding.
Indeed. They’ve been right in the thick of some of the worst disease outbreaks/disasters we’ve had, for years.
Bad gardeners grow weeds; good gardeners grow food; great gardeners grow soil.
Hi herc, good thing to remember and work for, isn’t it.