The old car is fine, and the Harvest Festival is a thoroughly positive experience -- a gloriously sunny day, I sell all my veggies except for a few pumpkins & squash, and net about $100. I even see lots of old Duluth friends, and make a few new ones.
Lenore comes with a friend, and then rides back to her place with me. We share a nice supper, and I drive back home after dark, by which time it's chilly and raining.
Cool weather, no bugs. Work a long day, getting vegetables ready to take to Harvest Fest: dig & wash potatoes, beets, carrots. Pick a few cucumbers and summer squash, and even pick the rest of the 1st & 2nd planting of sweet corn. Most of this is too hard & dry to eat, so will become seed for next year, but a few may be salable. Pick underripe tomatoes, too, to save them from the gopher or whatever has been eating them, but will not sell them. The Tercel is packed & ready, hope she makes the trip OK.
Rained all night, but cleared up right after dawn to another breezy day. I finish organizing the garage, and put the roof back on the pump house -- very pleasant to work outside and not be eaten by bugs.
I pick all the corn I can find and spend all evening cooking, cutting and freezing, over 20 pounds of kernels. Guess I'll be eating corn this winter.
Spent Friday morning cleaning & organizing some more and baking some quiche and apple pie. Phyllis, Ray, & Mom came around midafternoon. Phyllis & Ray stayed in the Stockade Motel in town, while Mom stayed out here with me. Too wet & foggy for sight-seeing, but they seemed to enjoy seeing my old homestead and hearing of my plans for it, tramping through the woods, picking veggies, sitting around, talking about family & religious matters as well as farm life, a good family experience. On both Friday & Saturday night, Mom & I played rummy till bedtime. And not a word of complaint about my primitive accommodations; she's a humble lady.
Sunday, I drove Mom to town where we met Phyllis & Ray, then to Lenore's for Mass and french toast after. Then they drove back to Mankato with some veggies in their trunk, and I came back home, too.
Today I occupy myself with various things. Clean out the extra shed for some firewood storage. Start chopping up some of the old oak logs that have been lying outside for years, discarding the real soft parts.
Decide to open up the bee hive, and extract by hand a small amount of honey - about 3 pounds of nice, light honey. Should really find an extractor to do a better job.
Pick carrots and corn for supper, and freeze 4 portions of corn. The 2nd planting is starting to get overripe now.
Picking stuff for my table, I find a couple more tomatoes damaged by a raccoon or skunk. This was rarely a problem in the city garden.
I cut away the leaky pipe joint, and re-do it with new fittings, then pressurize the system.
This time everything looks good, so I go ahead and hook up the one-pint SeaLand toilet. Seems to work OK - for now, it's just running into a covered bucket in the basement. Putting in a composter will be next.
Phyllis, Ray, and Mom are still planning on coming up tomorrow, so I spend the rest of the day cleaning and organizing the house - as much as this construction zone can be cleaned and organized.
Another beautiful day. After Lauds & breakfast, I patch the privy roof, then make a list of all my errands, and drive into town. I deposit the savings bond from Dad, and buy plumbing fittings and other supplies, then to Lenore's. I use my city bicycle from her place to run a few more errands, including to D.O.T. to register the truck. But walk-in citizens are punished (you have to pay an extra fee for them to take your money) and these Wisconsin employees refuse to disclose policy details, so I will have to do this via mail, I guess.
After lunch with Lenore, I use her phone to call about buying beef from a local farmer, and look into possibly selling produce at the Harvest Festival in a few days. Also pick the brains of a couple plumbing guys about the circulating hot water idea.
Warm and breezy, a gorgeous autumn-like day, so I take to the strawberry patch to do some weeding, down on all fours. This is a very slow task, and I let my thoughts drift where they will.
I remember the John-Denver-like character we met in Kentucky a few years ago, and his story of turning from a career as an investment broker to become a plain Mennonite farmer. As neither he nor his family had been raised to the plain life, his deliberate aim was to retain a modicum of comfort via creative but humble means. With this in mind, he tapped into a natural spring on the opposite side of the holler, piped the water down to the bottom, where a ram pump pushed a percentage of it up to a tank uphill from his house, spilling the excess into the creek at the bottom. From the tank, he ran more pipes back down to his house, thus achieving water pressure in his house without running an electric pump. Then he ran a pipe through his wood-burning stove, and stored this hot water in an insulated tank in his attic. So, without burning gas or oil or electricity, he had hot & cold running water. I was quite impressed, both with the ingenuity of his system and with the reasonable principle from which he proceeded.
I can still picture him, sandy hair, wire-rim glasses, as he showed us the stove with the built-in water plenum. He had learned to be careful to temper the hot water with cold, laughing as he exclaimed, "Hot? Lemme tell you, son, that water'll blister yer hide!". He even sounded like Johnny Denver.
Newly inspired, I take a piece of scratch paper and start mapping out a fairly simple way to run some pipes to heat water with my wood stove in the winter, and with an attic (solar) tank in the summer.
Back to the garden. I pick green beans, chard, broccoli, and sweet corn, most of which I freeze. I plant a few apple seeds in the back yard and in the meadow across the driveway.
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