Say what you want about the harshness of the winter season, at least you can see through the trees! It changes things up. In summer, a dense deep green privacy wall across the little meadow that could be called a lawn. When the leaves are gone, you can look past to the hillside across the hidden pond. This slice of the view is dense with fallen branches snapped by wind and ice storms. There are also window-like gaps where in summer you can see cows grazing on the hill.
Autumn
Firewood drop-off
First firewood delivery of the season, tumbled onto the lawn. This is from a property further north that has an endless supply of downed trees from the wind storm a few years ago, and the more recent ice storm. When you have many acres of woods and no logging operation, a severe tree-felling weather event can create a lot of dead wood. This is some of it!
Small potatoes
At the end of a brutally dry and hot summer, late planted potatoes manage to come through, tasty though overall quite tiny. Intended for personal use, a little winter stash that won’t last long!
Cows across the way
Cows grazing away from their home on rented pasture, on a delightful, newly-seasonable warm and sunny end of September day. You can’t tell from the zoomed photo, but they’re around 400′ (122m) away, seen through an opening in the trees. Being calmly stared at by cows at a distance is a fact of life that I finally just looked into. Cows apparently have amazing, better-than-human motion detection, near 360° vision with eyes on the sides of their heads, and an exceptional sense of smell that literally works for miles. They detect you from afar, then turn to stare with both eyes (binocular vision), so they can check you out in three dimensions to better decide what you’re up to. Peacefully grazing, always aware!
October harvest
Great weather into the first week of October, with no hard frost so far. The veggie harvest list: beets, carrots, peppers, garlic, onion, green onion, zucchini, spinach, kale, lettuce, cabbage, butternut squash, radicchio, broccoli, eggplant. Nice!
Summer ends!
For the last day of summer, a rainbow! The field is looking a bit bedraggled, with some things naturally dying out, some touched by near-freezing overnights, with tender crops row-covered against the possibility of a hard frost. Besides the rainbow, it’s not the postcard look of mid-summer, but what matters most, everything is still producing well!
Late season harvest
Looking pretty good for the end of October. Classic cool-season crops include leaf lettuce, pointy cabbage, bok choi and kale. Plus, the summer-loving sweet peppers are still hanging in.