HARVEST TIME

The days are getting shorter, the nights cooler and it’s harvest time.  We had to cover the pepper and tomato plants a couple of nights this past week to protect them from the cold and Thursday was our big harvest day.  We harvested a big bucket each of eggplants, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, carrots and beets and are hanging the hot pepper plants upside down to dry them.  Our onions are spread out on newspaper in the shop but we don’t think they’ll have enough drying time before we leave.  We’ll have to eat most of the tomatoes and sweet peppers as we’re not allowed to take them across the border into the United States.

Cleaning up the garden after harvesting was a big job.  I chopped the plants into smaller pieces using my hedge clippers and that worked well for everything but the marigolds.  We planted a row of the jumbo plants along the fence and they sure have thick stems and roots.  My arms got sore using the manual hedge clippers so I hooked up the electric hedge trimmer.  That worked all right on the flower stems and leaves but wouldn’t cut through the main stems.  Stuart got out the electric chainsaw next and hacked at them for a while.  We got them down to a reasonable level and I put the largest ones in a compost pile.  Stuart tilled the garden yesterday and worked all the plant materials back into the soil to improve the soil texture for the next growing season.

We’ve been preparing the outside areas for winter and on a rainy day a while ago, we burned a pile of wood scraps from our fence project.  Nice, warm fire.

Now we have put most of the patio furniture and the BBQ in the shop.  The last lawn mowing was on Friday and Stuart has been busy winterizing all the equipment:  lawn mower, rototiller, pressure washer.  Earlier in the week, he winterized the motorcycle and the boat which was an interesting job.  The small outboard motor was easy to do as the water drains out by gravity and the oil in the leg is easy to drain, but not so easy to fill up.  The inboard motor needed to have the water drained by removing hoses and opening drain valves and drain plugs and the engine oil had to be pumped out for changing.  We figured it out with no problems although the job took most of the day.

The other excitement this past week was getting our septic tank pumped out.  One of the joys of home ownership outside of city services.  There is only one company in the area that does the work and fortunately, he was able to do the job 2 days after we phoned.  Our tank is about 1200 – 1400 gallons so he had to make 2 trips to dump the waste at the city treatment facility.  He had it done in about an hour and a half and we won’t have to get it pumped out again for 4 to 5 years.

We’re one week away from departure and are working through our list of 59 “things to do” to prepare.  We’re ahead of schedule at this point which is a nice feeling.  If we get everything done before the end of the week, we can sit back and relax for a day or two, or maybe just an hour or two.

The next blog posting will probably be from somewhere in the U.S.A.