Gearing up for Winter

We had such a productive weekend - I LOVE that. Saturday was one of those days where you look at the clock thinking it's 4:00 and it's actually 1:00. I wish everyday was like that. We cleared out the garden, brought in all the stakes, pulled all the plants except for some broccoli (it's like its fifth harvest!), lettuce and chard. Put away the irrigation pipes and loaded everything up into the pickup.


Aaron then went to a roll session in our community pool, he's been getting back in the kayak and loving it. I'm pretty happy he's practicing all his rolls so if/when he goes in the river he's prepared to pop himself back up. I picked up all the dropped tomatoes and as many tomatillos as I could to prevent too many volunteers next year.


I made a batch of applesauce with the last of the apples from Harvest Festival. I did a couple loads of laundry. We made some homemade sriracha - I'll give it its own post in a week when it's done. I also used up the last of the apricots I bought in early summer, and made a batch of jam. We started winterizing the chicken coop, I painted panels that we will put up to block the wind. Speaking of wind, holy crap it was windy last night. There were actually branches down everywhere, which doesn't happen too often because we get frequent high winds. It also woke me up a few times even though I turned the fan up a notch.
Olive is going through a hard molt, literally within 3 days most of her feathers just fell out. Luckily it's been warmer, we had some freezing mornings and she would just stand on one leg hunkered down, shivering. I upped their protein so that their feathers will come in healthy and nice.


She looks so funny without a tail.


Last night we went to a homebrewer's club meeting. These guys are pretty serious, but it was a fun meeting. They made a HUGE batch of beer, a pale ale, then everyone hopped it differently. Each person was assigned a single hop, and then the beers were fermented the same temp/time. We did a blind taste test and wrote down what characteristics we got out of each hop flavor. It was good, but by #9 all of our taste buds were shot, and some of us (just me I think) were a little drunk. We're finally starting to meet some people and it's been nice to have a social life again!
Today we cleaned up the garage a bit, took some things to Goodwill and now Aaron is replacing the axle on his Suburu to extend its life past 300,000 miles.