We don’t have a ton of trees to lead-watch up here in agricultural Green Bluff, but we can still see and feel the full arrival of fall. Chilly mornings and coat-less afternoons dominate.
We are successfully avoiding our fall clean-up work, and I fear we are heading toward one of those “let’s just leave the garden as-is for the birds to pick at” years. That’s also known as the “Springtime regret” scenario, leaving all the clean-up for May. Last year I was overly motivated and probably had everything cleaned up, composted, and cover-cropped by now. Not quite feeling that motivated this year!
So here are some miscellaneous shots of our very relaxed and relaxing fall so far.
We start with a few indoor shots, first of our Apple themed fall tablescape and then our crazy living room set up with 3 at this point permanent Mahjong tables for our Wednesday night hosting duties.
But outside is where the real fall action is!
We are repurposing our garden shed. The winds blew the doors completely off, an occurrence they did not survive. We originally were going to tear it down, but we still need the outdoor storage space.
So Montana painted up the inside and stained up the outside, and we moved a potting table in, as well as all of the outdoor implements. So we have the greenhouse for weatherproof storage (eg our good hand tools, irrigation equipment, plant markers, herb and flower drying, etc. and we have the shed which will be exposed to the weather. I am making a canvas curtain which will partially protect the contents from the elements, just enough that we can use it for much-needed semi-protected storage.
It’s difficult to not take photos of the Whitworth campus every single day, it is so college-perfect this time of year.
We hold our community pancake breakfasts every weekend during busy harvest festival season, so when we work one, we bring a big pan of leftover pancakes and scrambled eggs for the hens.
We had fun checking out some Spokane neighborhood Halloween lights with the kids.
We try not to miss any local gem shows. We continue to add new faceted colored stone specimens to the collection, as well as interesting rough samples (as long as they are small enough to fit in the little gem cases I use for everything.)
You can see my VERY messy notes which will be transcribed into my official inventory and labeling system. I took advantage of the moment to completely update all 8 of my gem cases to “slide” everything down and make space within each individual case. Because it is all organized and numbered alphabetically by mineral families, when you add a stone to case 1 it can mean a cascading set of moves to hat impact all 8. So I bit the bullet and reorganized, adding space at the end of every case. I THINK everything is back in the right spot!
Two of our favorites from the show are the beautiful oval pink Morganite, which is a Beryl, the same stone as Emeralds (just pink) and a bright blue emerald-cut Kyanite, which has a very cool color-streaked crystal structure.
