Life on Little Elm: Slowing Down

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The weather is getting cooler; sometime this week the furnace will have to be started for the first time this fall. Nighttime temperatures will be in the 40's. Up to now I have just been piling on extra blankets and wearing a sweater during the day. Every year I wait as long as I can before using the furnace, because I know the next step is the fireplace. I am well stocked with firewood!

The crew are reduced to working only on Saturday afternoons, the mowing is still going on but it has been so wet lately that they haven't done much. This Saturday they will be mowing the yards and ditches. The grass is not growing nearly as fast now, and that's a good thing. There will be enough other work to keep them busy for a few more weeks. Flower beds need to be weeded and mulched for the winter, and there is maintenance of equipment and tools to be done. Saturday is the last day for my "foreman"; he is leaving for the Air Force. The other two workers are brothers still in high school. I am hoping to keep them on as long as possible. During the coldest months I will have to find them some busy work to do, but in spring it will pick back up. I hope they don't need to find another job--they are good workers and I will need them next year.

I have managed to rid myself of most of the nursery supplies my husband had stocked. Much was donated or given away, some was sold. I have about 20 of these bulb troughs left, but they are spoken for--a man in Illinois bought 20 of them a few weeks ago and had his sister bring them to him, and now he wants the rest.

I also still have this huge pile of pots to get rid of. Most of them have been used once but are still in good condition. I will be offering them for free on Craigslist. I just don't want to bother with them anymore. I will keep a few of each size for any future needs I might have, but since I am not a gardener, I won't need many.

I have never felt comfortable using my sewing room at night, mostly because of the patio door, which gives me a wide-open, vulnerable feeling. I always felt like someone was watching me. Finally I made a quilt to serve as a curtain for the door. It works great! During the day I open it for Trixie--she loves to sit in her bed and watch for rabbits. When she sees one she streaks through the house to go out the doggy door, by which time the rabbit is long gone, of course. At night I feel enclosed and protected with the curtain closed. With the sunlight coming through it looks like stained glass. I am very pleased with it!

In 2013 I filled my chest freezer with all sorts of food, thinking we might be snowed in during the winter. Now I'm trying to use up the older food that is in there. Now that it is just me, my stockpile is a bit too large. I realized that I hadn't protected some of it well enough--especially the breads, which have suffered freezer burn. I had to throw much of that away. What is left was wrapped in foil and seems okay, but I am working on using up what I can instead of buying everything fresh. I have lots of meat and bags of chopped veggies like carrots, onion, green peppers, and celery--all the makings for a good stew except the potatoes. I have been using my crockpot once a week to make enough meals to last the week. It's a good plan except that by the end of the week I am tired of eating the same thing every day, so I try to change it up. I have fixed pork stew, beans, chili, cube steaks in gravy, spaghetti sauce (which I can freeze) or chicken breasts, which I cook up to use with noodles or in chicken pot pie. I love my crockpots--I have two, one has three different sized crocks with differing controls for each size, and the other is a regular oval one I bought at a garage sale, brand new, for $10. I am not a great cook, but a crockpot can make me seem to be.

About a month ago I was at my local home improvement store (my husband called it the blue box store to differentiate it from the orange box store.) They were having a sale on their fruit trees-25% off. I bought 2 apple trees, columnar apples that have only a 2-foot spread when mature. Two weeks ago I went back and the sale was 50% off, so I bought several more trees, including a dwarf McIntosh apple, a flowering cherry, two red dogwoods, and a red maple. The crew got them all planted for me, and I hope they all survive the winter. Several of the trees I had planted from my husband's nursery did not survive the hot summer. Next spring I will try to buy more trees to replace some of them. I had all three apple trees planted in the same area, near the woodshed. I optimistically call that my orchard. I intend to eventually add three or four more apple trees there.

I have done very little in the way of holiday decorating this year, but I did get out some Halloween things, since I hosted the quilt club here last week. This spiderweb quilt made with Halloween themed fabrics on my dining table: