Before the Cold Comes

These days I feel like I'm the ant in Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper.  Hurry!  Hurry!  Hurry!  Winter is coming!   The weather forecasts hard frost tonight.

Here's a picture of the corn and mustard greens I canned the other day:

I'm quickly running out of canning jars.

I dried the first batch of Golden Celery and Italian Flat Leaf Parsley in the dehydrator and bagged them this morning.  The second batch is drying now.  Tom added some of the celery flakes to a beef stew that we had for supper tonight.  I can't believe how strong the celery taste is from those dried flakes.  I mean, is it the celery variety, or is it just that the celery is fresh from the garden?  The unsold fennel is one of tomorrow's projects if I can find my herb book to see how best to dry the roots and preserve the fronds.  I should go to the farmers market tomorrow, but I have just too much to do here around the house. 

We have been working to get as much done around the farm as we can before the cold weather sets in.  Yesterday and today, Tom and I worked taking down the fence around his garden that was under the power lines and what fence was left uncrushed from the tornado surrounding my forest garden  -- the same fence I worked so hard to put up this past Spring.  What a job!  We rolled up all the fencing and temporarily put it behind the wood piles.  Hopefully it will be out of the way when the loggers get here.  Why do tasks always take longer to do than you think they will? Tomorrow we plan to mark the trees around the house that we want harvested, and I want to clean up the garden boxes for garlic planting next month. 

Oh, well.  I'd like to talk more but I'm beat.  Talk to you soon.