Fall is here and not a raspberry in sight
All the spring and summer rain this year meant everything got off to a slow start.
This year’s aspen trees have a wasting disease from all the moisture so few of the trees have the really bright yellow leaves right now.
Each year different wildflowers bloom and this year purple flowers took over the back yard. The pods are pretty though and worth a picture.
The Bar B is home to a thousand raspberry bushes but I didn’t get a single raspberry. The cats use the bushes as cover and Petticoat and Skeeter frequently spend the night in there, safe from whatever is out there at night.
Years ago someone plants wild roses under the lodgepoles in the back yard and this year they didn’t bloom either. They don’t seem to like all the rain we had but they did have good colors this year.
The tomatoes got off to a really slow start, once again because of the rain. I even bought them in April but it didn’t matter, I only had three tiny tomatoes. There’s tons of small, green tomatoes but they won’t ripen before the first frost which should be any day now. It’s been in the low 30s at night so frost is just around the corner.
The wood shed! I bought an additional cord this year and asked for all big pieces so I could control what size I needed as the winter wears on. I learned it’s a bad thing to get to the middle of winter and only have small pieces to burn. The large pieces mean I can split the wood into 2 pieces or make kindling if I needed.
There’s no more hardwood left, only a few straggly pieces that are 4 years old and need to be burned. I’ll see how it goes through the winter without hardwood but I imagine I’ll go through my stash pretty fast.
I packed the woodshed really tight this year so there’s actually more wood in there than you’d think. I wanted to keep one side partially full so I could have a place to put my wheelbarrow and paper for starting fires in the woodstove.
There’s a funny story about that blue snow shovel. I bought it in 2007 when I was still living in Highlands Ranch. We’d had some bad snows and my old shovel gave out. This shovel is in bad shape with no real edge to it but it works really well on snow between the house and woodshed. The fancy, metal-edged shovel is in the back yard to use when the snow piles up back there. I look at that shovel and it reminds me that old things can still work when you need them to.
