Coming back to the homestead after some time spent away makes for a lot of abundance!

To be honest, there was too much abundance. I just ignored it the first two days due to overwhelm! Slowly I started picking things-- like the peppers you saw yesterday. Today it was time to "deal with" the tomatoes.

Sometimes tomatoes make me feel a little grossed out. One of the main pests they attract, the hornworm, is one of the worst bugs in the garden. In fact, and don't judge me here, I wont even touch the things. I call Ini over or cut them in half with my pruners! It's gruesome and horrible, but I just can't stand it. They're the most muscular bugs around... and they ooze pure bright green guts -- from all of the tomato plant of yours that they've eaten!

Many of our plants did get chewed up quite a bit while we were gone by these guys. But we still had a pretty good harvest on.

Onto the stove for some salsa!

For my birthday my mom got me a breadmaker!

She's so sweet- she had heard me upset about my lack of oven for long enough. It really is a blessing to have! I popped in a rye loaf today and 3 hours later it was finished...

Sadly, we had to take 2 of our chickens today. One was actually my favorite bird, Myrtle... That one was hard to do. But I thanked her for her spirit and presence on the homestead and explained to her that we just couldn't have her around anymore cuz she and her friend were digging around the fruit trees down to the roots-- exposing the roots! They'd already killed some berry plants and I just couldn't lose a 1.5 year old fruit tree to their scratching. We had to take the main culprits...

And onto the stove they went! Chicken soup is one of my favorite things as it starts to get cold outside.

As the salsa bubbled away and reduced down...

I took some photos of more seasonal harvests from our area.

You got it!, we got more Paw Paws!

Haha, you know we love these. We're enjoying them so much. Talk about them every day... Are so glad that we planted a bunch of them already and we plan to do more. Incredible, incredible fruit..

And guess what else is ripe?!

Persimmons!

We'll do a full post on these likely tomorrow, but these are another one of our favorite local fruits. As you can see from the pic, they're almost mushy - and this is how you want them.

If you pick them too early they'll be so astringent that you may be tempted to never try one again! Yet don't give up.. these are a delicacy of the midwest. Not an asian persimmon, but our native variety. They grow like weeds this year and I think the harvest will be pretty good. As I said, more on this tomorrow.

We've been eating soup all day and some butter with a little bread.

Though we're "putting the garden to bed" in many ways, in others the homestead still feels very vigorous and alive. We have likely another month before the first frost.

I cleaned up the small high tunnel today by harvesting all of the tomatoes in there and taking the bushes out then amending the beds with blood meal and compost. Some leek babies were hanging out so I have to decide what to do with those.

It's been a bit of whirlwind coming back from vacation and it's been overwhelming at times. I'm trying to bring my relaxed, even detached, view I got when on vacation back to the homestead with me, but it's so easy to get sucked into everything. It's a practice for me to take small bites off of the list and to prioritize balancing activities. I hope I get better at that as my previous methods were pretty crazymaking.

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Making - Sunday

Today definitely felt like a clearing and making day. Clearing energy feels good and creates room for Making! I started the day with a fire burning old paperwork and moved into the day seeing where the harvests were. There's a lot of energy to move on a homestead on any given day.

At least we eat really well!

Ciao!