Some of these pictures are current and some are many months old, showing the season’s progress.

The garlic came in months ago and hung in our pantry to dry.  I finally brought it down, trimmed it, cleaned up the heads and sorted the bulbs for eating from the ones for planting.  We’re hoping to grow around 80 heads next year ::fingers crossed!::.

It seems like it took forever to finally have enough ripe tomatoes to make our first batch of sauce.  We grew over a hundred pounds of tomatoes this year and almost none of them actually ripened on the vine.

I usually dry herbs throughout the summer season, a little bit here and there.  I didn’t this year.  Many of my usual garden chores were neglected this year.  Now I’m bringing in huge bunches to dry all at once.

The sunflowers have come in slowly, one by one, sometimes in little clumps.  What started as the tiny little bundle of seed heads drying on my dining room wall (pictured above) now extends nearly to the floor.  There will be some seeds for us and some for our bird friends, hopefully with plenty left over to plant in the spring.

Last week was a very long one and clearly blogging wasn’t much of a priority for me.  This weekend we were at home.  The weekend was busy as well, but in an entirely different way.  Something of a reclaiming of the space and our life in it.  I put up 11 pints of green tomato chutney, a batch of apple sauce and 3 trays of roasted tomatoes (all of which were ripened on window sills!).  We’re loving roasted tomatoes lately.  Such a lovely way to preserve not just your tomatoes, but the garlic and fresh herbs from the garden as well.  I’m using fresh herbs all the time now.  All too soon they will be buried under the snow!  We completed a few projects around the house and started others.  Elijah invented an interesting new way of storing our apples.  We gathered in all of the delicate produce still about; the last of the beans, tomatoes, zucchini, basil, baskets and baskets full, as next week is supposed to be a very cold one and none of it would survive.

Yes, we’re settling back in to our normal rhythms.  It feels good to be home.