Catching up

It certainly feels like fall here, with yesterday's rain and drizzle and high in the 50s. Today should return to, well, not really a summer feel, but an Indian summer, even though it's still technically summer. Steve has put together a garden montage that shows our agricultural efforts in all its glory, before the Killer Hailstorm of August 08. Sigh.

One day in the first week of August, I watched the particularly black clouds roll in, excited for a break from the heat and the thrill of lightning and thunder. I called Steve as it started to pour, and the hail got louder and louder on our porch roof until I couldn't hear a word he said. I began to realize this wasn't like the other hail storms we'd received as I noticed that a good 50 percent of what was falling from the sky were pieces of leaves, from the trees above us. I watched as our squash leaves shredded into tatters and our onion tops split and curled like wrapping ribbon. Our neighbors assured us that was the worst hailstorm they'd seen in many years, if ever, which made me feel a bit better, as I had decided there was no point in gardening if that happened every year!

I lost the will to blog after that, I'm afraid to say.... Didn't want to sort through the sad pictures that reminded me of wasted energy (I had a girlfriend visit the house an hour after the storm and blithly ask, "So what have you been doing all summer?" I wanted to weep.) Luckily, Steve found a will somewhere and was able to reconstruct the gardens in their glory days. You can click on the photo to get a bigger version of it -- included is a shot of a new raised bed we've planted and a shot of the kids and a neighborhood friend feeding our chickens.



















As it turned out, some things came through unscathed and some bounced back. We have a few zucchini baseball bats as a testament to my faithlessness regarding the durablility of squash (I didn't check the patch for survivors for weeks). Steve's tomatoes got dinged but not downed. We planted a bed in mid August that is doing fabulously -- full of cool-season greens and sugar snap vines that we hope to coddle through the first early frosts.

The rest of August was a mixed bag -- I had a lovely stomach virus that lasted a week and a half and cured me of my romantic visions of chickens sitting in my lap as we watch the sun set (not, mind you, that I think I got it from chicken poop -- it was going around in a big way here -- but cleaning chicken poop up when you're nauseous gets old reeeally fast...) So Steve's working on a run for them in the yard as I type.

The crazy heat-wave of summer (driest first half of the year on record at DIA, longest stretch of days over 90 too) was shattered with that hailstorm and the couple days of rain that followed it. We've had what I think of as early fall days ever since. So the pool's been put away for the year.

We found a u-pick rasberry patch in town, a half-acre that a family tends, without chemicals, and we've been getting up early one day every week or two to pick. It's been a poor year for fruit, because of the cold spring, so the raspberries haven't hit their stride yet and we've only managed to get a pound or less each visit so far (it doesn't help that we can't get up and out there early enough to beat the first pickers to the best fruit). So far, the kids have eaten all the berries on the drive home, but I'm hoping to pick huge amounts sometime in the coming weeks that I can freeze for winter consumption.

We had a not-back-to-school potluck at the end of August that was great fun -- it's always inspiring to see what other parents are finding for their children to explore, and at the BBQ I met a homeschooling/Unitarian Dad who is a manager at my local nursery and who offered to set me up with some filberts and other edible landscape plants at a discount -- score! Now our front yard has an army of raspberries, currants, gooseberry, serviceberry and an Asian pear tree, all in pots, waiting to be planted! Eeek, what have I done?!

We went on our first camping trip in the Colorado mountains last week, up to Rocky Mountain National Park with some unschooling friends, one family from town and a couple families from the Boulder area. Huge fun! The kids are ready to camp every week, with their friends of course (the cool thing about unschooling families is, they might actually be willing to camp every week!)

It was a lovely evening around the campfire, and shortly after we retired to our tents, it started to rain. Steve and I lay there listening to the rain patter on the tent fly, thinking how lovely it was, and the rain went on, and on, and on, and I started to wonder if we had pitched our tent in a swale and if so, how much water might pool up, then I began to feel a gentle impact on my sleeping bag, oh, round about my hip, and I reached out into the very chilly night air to feel the drops falling, one by one, from our leaking tent fly... Sigh.

After a couple hours, the rain stopped and I got out to assess the damage, only to find the most stunning night sky I've seen in years. I gasped that I could see the Milky Way, which woke Maddie, so we stood under that gorgeous expanse of stars and meteors and clouds of galactic light for 20 minutes, picking out the constellations we recognized, counting the meteors that flashed. Maddie even saw a meteor that curved sharply, and after we decided that meteors probably can't do that, we began to wonder exactly what she had seen, since planes don't go fast enough to leave a tail of light... got a little spooky after that, and since it was clouding over again, we headed in to our damp tent. I let the kids have my spot on the airbed with Steve, and I slept the rest of the night in the van, if you can call it sleep.

Morning came none too soon, with frost on the benches, snow on the near peaks and a fire that Steve, bless his soul, was able to resurrect after all that rain. A glorious outing, despite the damp.

We're going to a church camp in the mountains in another week and a half, which I think will satisfy the kids camping bug, even though we're staying in a cabin this time. We've re-engaged in the UU community, after a summer of contentment at home. I'm teaching a fourth grade RE class that's exploring world religions through their holidays and holy days, which I think will be a very fun way to explore other cultures. The kids are excited about attending that with me.

All in all, fall (or it's imminent calendar arrival) is energizing us and we're having great fun -- now if only I can get all those plants into the ground in the next month!