Decorating

We've talked about it for years, and then on a whim last night, seeing the Christmas lights on clearance at Target, I called Matt to see if he wanted some from his Mom for Christmas, and he said yes! Today we put one string of lights up around the flat roof overhang on the 2013 addition. Kind of funny how the string of lights was an exact, perfect fit!!

Ready for winter

It wasn't a year for much of anything to happen in the yard, but I did manage to get the wreath updated for the fall season, and then with the red ribbon in time for Christmas.

All set for fall...

We'll see if I actually get a chance to get a PHOTO of the ribbon!

The Cunningham's apples

This has just NOT been a year for the garden. As I looked out from the second story window at the completely fallow garden, seeing the one lone red tomato that I had seen, but hadn't even had the time to get out and pick, even though it would have meant a 30% increase in our yearly tomato crop, it made me think of the Sabbath years that God commanded the Israelites to give to their own fields - a year of no planting, but only harvesting what came up on its own.

We got a hint of that with our ten baby pumpkins. Ten pumpkins for our ten children growing up in this motley garden. Coincidence? I think not.

But, getting just one jar of pear sauce out of all of the fruit trees in the backyard made getting a gift of a bag of apples from our friends' trees that much more special. (The Cunninghams got 3000 pounds of apples this year, and sent a bag via the Engessers last week.) Even more fun was having Mr. Cunningham bring three more boxes of apples - roughly 100 pounds! - and tucking them behind the dumpster at his office in St. Paul.

Evania and I went out after lunch (with Eben in tow), to pick them up. She was my helper in case the boxes were too heavy or awkward for me, and they really were, so she helped me lighten the load by piling some into bags.

 And here's the haul all loaded up in Big Blue. Yum!!!

Ugly Mushroom

It's not so great out there when this is the most prominent "blooming" thing you can see...

 But this one pot that I managed to get fully planted has managed to hang on and be a spot of beauty in an otherwise mostly neglected yard this year.

The garden wall

The following was lifted from Room for More:

~~~

So, Saturday night, about 7pm, Bobbi was discharged from the hospital and got to come home. That began a truly miserable night, culminating in a 4:30am 911 call when we'd exhausted our options for pain management, and her anxiety over the pain (not helped by the narcotics) causing the pain to escalate even further. Poor girl. Matt followed the ambulance down to the hospital in our little Jetta (easier to park!) and spent a few hours there not sleeping while they got things calmed down a bit, and swapped out one of her meds to give her something more effective at relaxing her muscles. Then they wanted to send her back home. (Yikes!!) So Matt had to drive back - so nice that we're so close! - and swap out for Big Blue because she doesn't fit in the Jetta with her casts. Honestly, we'd been thinking with the state she was in that she would be readmitted and he would not be bringing her back home that same morning, which is why he took the Jetta in the first place. He parked the Jetta way up on the driveway next to our trailer to give plenty of room to navigate Big Blue on the return trip, came in, got some breakfast, gathered a few things, and about 45 minutes later was back out the door to bring her back home.

I realized that we were going to need some extra hands during the day, because caring for her was a full-time-and-then-some job for both me and Matt during the night. We were both terribly fatigued, and knew we had a day full ahead of us. I made two unsuccessful phone calls while staring out the front window. Then I saw the Jetta heading down the driveway, and I mindlessly wondered where Matt was going...and then remembered...Matt had already gone!...the Jetta was leaving the premises of its own accord!!!! Phone in hand, I dialed 911 for the second time that morning (is that what you're supposed to do for runaway cars? I don't know.) Somehow, the car made it down our curving driveway, over the low garden wall at the bottom, across the street, through the ditch, across the west-bound highway lane, into the central ditch where it settled down and there it sat.

You have to zoom in, but it's there if you look.

Um. This is not good. The woman I spoke with from the highway patrol was delightfully kind, and said not to worry at all since it was out of both drive lanes. I called our neighbor and she took on the task of getting it towed out of the ditch. Then I emailed our pastor. "We need help..." And help came in the form of Faith and her mom (who is in our small group bible study).

It's kind of a scary thing to realize that you are so sleep deprived that you are (apparently) missing really important things like making sure your car is properly secured before leaving it, but the story became even more curious when we learned from the man who towed it out for us that it was in gear and the parking brake was engaged when he checked it out before towing it out. It started for him, too, amazingly, as he turned it a bit to get a better angle for the tow.

What in the world???

I'm only being slightly facetious when I say that the only option I can think of is that it was the hand of God that pushed that car down the driveway.

Because, apparently, we needed just exactly that much more stress layered onto that Sunday. I remember thinking at the moment as I was thanking God that my car was running away down the driveway that there must really be some truly marvelous shaping and forming that is going on. The precision with which my Surgeon is breaking and cutting and re-shaping is incredible.

I went out the next day to survey the damage done to my garden. I really, really enjoy my gardens (even to the point that I keep a crazy little blog that only I have the address for where I post photos of what's blooming, show me and the kids working in it, tell stories about plants that have come with special memories of friends and family, and talk about the progress, or lack thereof, of Matt's and my vision for the yard. It's fun having almost an acre to play with, and all of the raw material from his grandma's amazing perennial gardens). The garden at the bottom of the driveway is a newer one, and the limestone wall along our edge of it is still being constructed at the top edge. Just not this summer. Nothing at all happened in the gardens this summer, and only a little bit last year. When my parents' friend Carrie spent a week with us in June, one thing that really mattered to have her help with was mulching that garden around a few new plants our neighbor split off and shared with me so that I had one. nice. tidy. place that gives the impression that the home and yard is being cared for. It looked really nice all summer. To have that one bit of garden-sanity that we have this year get run over by my own car was not missed by me.

And yet, beautifully, when I went out the next day to inspect the damage as I checked the mail, (Oops. Columbus Day. No mail.) this is what I saw:

Since it's hard to see, here's a photo-shopped version to help you see the track that the tire made as it went through the garden.

It crushed one begonia (an annual - not a big deal in October), but ran right in between the others and my wild geraniums. It missed the daylilies, and one sedum was hit, but only lost a few branches. It will come back just fine in the spring.

The only real loss out of the whole thing was my favorite piece of limestone that I had placed carefully to work as a seat while we wait for buses at the bottom of the driveway.

Now that's the precision work of an extremely talented surgeon, if you ask me.

For some reason, the whole thing with the car has served to be a hugely tangible reminder that not a single thing that happens during this extremely strenuous time is happening by accident. It is all designed just as precisely as the way that car ran through my one decent looking garden.

What's growing now?

It's definitely fall. Everything is wearing down after a year where the gardens were mostly neglected. I have a more exciting post about the front driveway garden, but I don't know if or when I'll be able to post about it.

In the meantime, this is what I found growing out the back door this morning.

Now that's a rather ugly mushroom.

 But the pot by the office door doesn't look too bad, even at this point in the season. The front door pot isn't as photogenic, and the pot in the garden by the circle lawn is still dirt. But this one looks pretty.

The tomato harvest

The year's tomato harvest. I DID spent $2.99 on the plants at Menards. I don't think we quite got our money's worth! But those three did taste good, and those tiny little baby toes you see under my pinky are part of the reason why this is the extent of the harvest, and I wouldn't trade those for bushels of tomatoes!

Carrots

We found a swallowtail caterpillar, affectionately named "Carrots", on our dill earlier this summer, and after careful feeding had a successful chrysalis, followed by a butterfly!

Bridget is very much on her last legs (she's 19 this summer!) and it was a joy to have her follow us down to the dill where we released Carrots. She's old and frail, but still living her life.

Pumpkins

This was not a year for planting anything, but we appreciated a few volunteers. The front garden between the driveways sprouted a mini-pumpkin vine, and Reuben and I (with some help at the end from Gloria) picked ten mini pumpkins yesterday. The vine dried up early - not sure why - but we've still got 10 babies fully orange on there.

 And, courtesy of my phone without any intention on my part, here's a photo of the larger pumpkin plant (still green) a little further down, next to the dill that seeded itself last fall. We've enjoyed that fresh addition to our lunches here and there, and also found "Carrots" the caterpillar, which just over the weekend formed his chrysalis.

Astilbe

They don't have as extended of a bloom time as some other things do, but they're still fun. These particular astilbes have lived in at least three locations in our yard before we finally found a place where they are predictably happy. As you can see, they are quite well settled here, and we enjoy them every year when they're doing their thing.

New blooms in great-grandpa's garden

Last year the lilies Great-Grandpa shared with me came up, but weren't sturdy enough yet to bloom.

This year, however, we're going to get a decent showing, and I finally get to see what color they are!

From the looks of it, they're going to be a beautiful deep pinkish corally red.

Garden help

With a week long visit from my parents' friend from Wisconsin, we were able to get the front garden by the driveways weeded and mulched (with a thick layer of newspaper - free and ugly - and a thin layer of Menards' cheapest mulch), despite my being 36 weeks pregnant.

The girls were often swirling around nearby, and I was grateful for Rinnah's help throwing a few more annuals into the gap at the bottom that's just a little too close to the salt and the plow to be good for much. I've still got to figure out which perennials will be good down there.

I also gained a few plants (down here all sedum) from our neighbors who are moving and wanted a place to stash some perennials until they find a new place. Even better, she planted them for me, since the ground is a long way down these days! The sharing is definitely part of the fun of a garden.

Hydrangeas

"Mom, can I pick one of your white flowers - the big ones?"

Garden style

Who knew that disassembled bleeding hearts could make such great dress-up jewelry?

Great-grandpa's garden

The day after the blizzard...

It looks a little different out there in the yard this year than it did a year ago yesterday!

 or a year ago today!

Syrup

Even when nothing is growing in the garden, there are still opportunities to take advantage of its productive opportunities. We've been tapping our maple trees, and those of two or three of our neighbors since Reuben was a very small boy. It's now become one of his very favorite activities of the whole year, and he takes the work very seriously.

Tapping the trees - we use old milk jugs to catch the sap.

Matt's been using a three-pan system for the last two years. This makes the whole process go a lot faster, and he's been able to get a lighter syrup for the finished product, too.

Just to the left of center you can see a big cylinder of ice he pulled out of his holding bucket, using the Native American trick of just freezing off the water and getting a head start on concentrating the sap to get to the proper sugar content.

The whole rig in all its glory. Those cinder blocks are slowly crumbling - every year it's a little more "riggish" and one of these years he's going to have to purchase some new ones! (These are all still left over from the demolition during remodeling at our church years ago.)

Reuben's beloved job is to feed the fire.

 And the finished product from the first boil: nearly two gallons of beautiful, pure, home grown and home made maple syrup!