Apple Butter Day!!!!

 

Red, White, and Purple

Potatoes of three different colors came out of the ground yesterday morning: Red, White, and Purple.

In other harvesting news, a fine berry season wrapped up recently. Nearly 90 cups, with most being blackberries. The 20 cups of raspberries were the most fabulous ever here!

This morning, we thinned some white ash to help out red oak and yellow birch youngsters. One red oak leans heavily west, but next year will start to grow an eastern crown, which was 100% shaded prior to the morning work.

Before/After

Both saws did some nice work yesterday morning. We cut, stacked -- and even did a small amount of splitting-- of a collection of generally smaller wood which had been adding up since last autumn. Much of the paper birch fell to help sugar maples and oaks enjoy more sun. This kindling and some larger wood will sit for well over a year before burning. Here are before/after pictures of the glorious effort.

Harvest goodies prior to processing

Six cups of blackberries about to begin transformation to blackberry jam.

These cut cucumbers will become either pickles or a nice salad with onions.

Harvest day

In addition to 3 1/2 cups of berries from the woods, some lovely vegetables were harvested at the neighborhood garden today. Here are a cabbage, some onions and three cucumbers.

For the berries, 1 1/2 cups of raspberries were picked, along with a cup each of blueberries and blackberries. They've looked really good this year, even with all the rain.

Picture for the season

Mid-July means raspberries! These beauties, one cup of fruit, were picked this morning, the second small harvest so far. More berries are coming in throughout the forest. It's a berry nice time of year, except for the humidity, quite high for about two weeks! Relief arrives soon, thankfully.

Kale and radishes

The raised garden bed has produced many great radishes this summah, as well as huge leaves of kale. This picture shows this morning's harvest.