Officially fall has not arrived yet but it sure feels like fall now. The nights are much cooler, it gets darker noticeably sooner and the days are not nearly as hot. I love fall! Fall is my favorite time of year because we still get plenty of sunny warm days but the nights are cool which is so much easier to sleep. A well rested person is a much better person.
We are doing lots of outdoor projects like painting parts of the house that are getting faded or peeling paint. It's been way too long since we gave the outside of our house some attention and love and it shows. It's easy and fairly inexpensive to put on a fresh coat of paint and your house looks amazing again. Well maybe not amazing but at least like people who give a darn about their home live there.
The raccoons are out in are yard at night again and they have decided to dig up our grass around our vegetable boxes. I hope they are finding some tasty bugs because they are trashing our lawn. We go out every morning and tamp the dirt and grass back into the holes they dig. We have never had them do this before so not sure what they are finding out there.
I have started to knit my 4th pair of socks. Sock knitting is kind of like magic when you have four needles and knit in a circle. It always amazes me when they turn out so well and people can actually wear the socks. I buy good quality wool and nylon yarn so the socks feel like silk on your feet. I still have to finish the baby blanket I was knitting for my nephew. I messed it up and had to rip out so much I was so discouraged that I didn't work on it for too long and now he's not really a baby anymore as he's over 1 year old now. I'll just finish the blanket and hope that someone in our family has a little boy because the blanket is blue.
Speaking of blue blankets I would not care if my daughter was given a blue blanket when she was a baby but so many people are still stuck in the blue for boys and pink for girls thinking that I don't want to upset any moms or dads by not following the unwritten rules for baby gifts. I could rip the whole thing out and use the blue yarn for something else but I think I'll just finish it and keep it or maybe donate it if I can't find someone who needs a wonderfully soft hand knit baby blanket.
I may try to knit some baby hats and booties. These are really popular gifts and if I could find some fun yarns they would be snapped up at Christmas markets. My sister knits socks and has gone to many markets with her socks. She has recently taken up spinning yarn and is only going to do a couple of markets this fall. If I can get some things knit in time I can join her and try to sell them. I know people don't pay what they are actually worth because they don't consider your time worth anything but it's more for fun than making a bunch of money. If you can make your money back you can buy more yarn and keep knitting things. It's more a mental health thing for many people but at some point you have enough socks, hats etc and need to gift or sell them. So for my sister she's just happy to keep knitting and making enough money to buy more yarn or now wool to spin.
I've also got my sewing machine out to zip up some lavender sachets. Probably going to give those as Christmas gifts. Might make some jams too because who doesn't love a jar of homemade jam? I know I always love getting homemade gifts. How about you, do you enjoy homemade gifts and what kinds are your favorites? I need more inspiration for Christmas this year. I always start strong thinking I'm going to make all these things and then slowly realize I've not got the time nor the energy to complete them all so it's off to the store for some lovely boxes of chocolate which everyone is happy to get too.
We harvested all out carrots this year and I'm always amazed at how well carrot tape works. We tried and tried to grow carrots in the past but they never grew properly. Then we bought carrot seeds embedded in that tape stuff. All of a sudden we are getting wonderful carrots. I'm going to assume we weren't thinning our carrots well enough. Tomatoes and peppers grew really well as usual and our beans were okay but I think they are in a spot that is too hot for them. We don't have much luck with peas because it gets too hot too quickly and we only have one small space were they can have afternoon shade. Cucumbers grew okay but no pumpkins this year. The sunflowers were amazing too. Other than some herbs that is all we have space to grow in our small yard and with the weird sun light we get. I got a shade cloth we were going to hang on the clothesline to protect the plants from the hottest time of day but we didn't use it this year. We get heat from 40-45C (104-113F). In other words most of our summer days are well over 100F which is dang hot.
For the first time we have so many roma tomatoes I want to can some tomato sauce. I think I'll roast the tomatoes first with some garlic, onion and olive oil then blend them up with my immersion blender. I'm hoping that will give the sauce a better flavour than the other sauce we made. Does anyone have a tried and true tomato sauce recipe they can share? I'd be grateful for a good one.
Anyway I'm off to bed as it's gotten late. Hope you are all doing well in your part of the world.
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