Now, as far as the garden goes, we're in a holding pattern. I pulled up all of the garlic that was planted last fall; it's hanging, drying in the shed. Next come the onions and more garlic that I'd planted this spring. But other than that, we're just waiting on beans, tomatoes and corn. It will be a few more weeks until we get the latter two, and probably a month before the beans are ready... I planted them a little late this year.

So... around 10 days ago, clumps of berries on our plants, starting to turn red:

We picked maybe a cup or two of berries, and they were juicy and delicious. It kept/keeps raining, and it seemed likely that the remainder of the berries might not make it -- that they might rot on the vine. A lot of the berries were hanging very low to the ground, or were just laying on the ground. But then we finally had a few clear days and last weekend, nestled among the plants, we discovered we had what I consider a bounty of berries!

By Sunday night I had picked two small-ish but heaping colanders of berries. And some more that we ate before I could take this picture:

We ate them plain, ate them mixed in with yogurt... and Evan made strawberry ice cream! I'm going to cut this posting short so I can go have another small bowl of it before bedtime...

Outside of the peas, of which I have four rows, this year I'm planting a lot more of a little. For instance, two eggplant plants. Two pepper plants. A length of beets that might span 18 inches. A short two-foot row of red onions. A longer row of yellow onions. Three feet of spring onions. Etc.

Even so, we had to expand the garden quite a bit -- maybe by 1/3rd, in order to account for my overzealous plans. I think I'm maxed out now, in terms of garden size.

Even though a neighbor came by with a huge tiller behind a small tractor, to dig up a new swath of garden, that soil still required a lot of tending before we could plant anything there. I had to turn the soil over and break up clumps of dense matter that was speckled with clay. Then I worked in some mushroom soil, and pulled out the roots of the sod that had been torn up, so it wouldn't re-sprout. Here's the view of the entire garden area, around mid-last weekend:

This project had the good fortune of not taking twice as much time as we planned. In fact, pretty much all of it went as planned!

First, Evan measured the width of the stream, got wood, and built the frame in the shed/ garage:

Then we loaded the frame and pieces for the walkway of the bridge in our old truck, drove everything down to the woods, and carried the pieces into the woods and scrutinized where to put it, exactly.

We settled on a position; lugged all the pieces in place; and then Evan drilled the rest of it together.

Voila! Now Nate has a bridge that he can throw sticks off of. And I don't have to worry about falling face-first in the mud while trying to carry him across the stream...

In the past few weeks, the spinach has rebounded even more; I have a few patches of it growing in the garden, and some kind of wild critters ate some that was in an unfenced area.

As well, in the past few days I spied new growth -- finally, the peas that I sowed the weekend before St. Patrick's Day are starting to appear.

It seems like it's been a chilly spring, and right now it's wet and cold outside. But the temperature is supposed to go up this weekend, and I hope to finally get out in the garden and enjoy it...!

Actually, we finished it two weeks ago, just in time for some house guests. Still, all in all it took around 3 1/2 months to finish. Very happy with the results... but wow. Really feels like we've been working on it forever.

The following picture doesn't do it justice, but this is what the room used to look like (dates to when we moved into the house):

There was an excess of wood trim in this room, which required layer after layer of paint. (The wood trim was finished with a weird ripple effect that we did not like.)

The room also suffered from a lot of cracks in several of the walls, plus water damage, which all required repair and weeks of work before we even started painting.

We'd ripped up the brown / white carpet in the "before" picture years ago, but underneath that was some hideous linoleum. (Sorry, no picture of that.)

So, a month or so ago -- as we were finishing up the trim -- we ripped up the more-than-40-year-old linoleum and painted the floor with floor paint. (I believe the color -- viewable in the above "after" picture -- was French Grey, or something like that... a nice, light, bluish grey.)

We kept on painting too -- now we're painting the hallway just outside of the bedroom. And, Evan spent a day ripping up more linoleum and putting down tiles of carpet (Flor!) in that hallway area. But last weekend, we got an early visit from spring, so we put these efforts on hold for a week, as we took care of some work outside... More on spring -- we started planting -- soon!

Since the weekend after Thanksgiving, I have been working on renovating the "guest bedroom." This room was tolerable, but for some reason it grated on my nerves. It was an awful color blue, there were cracks in the walls, and something about its rundown state infected my vision of the entire house. It is also one of the last rooms that we haven't put some modern touches on. (There are also hallways to tackle... in some future year.)

I started by spackling, then sanding, then spackling some more. At this point, Evan lent a hand in making sure the spackle job was up to par, and with more sanding, and then we launched into painting. Long story short, we're done with painting the walls and ceiling, and part-way through applying primer to the trim. There is, ugh, a lot of trim in this room. We painted the walls a light creamy tan color.

Because the few photos that I took during the spackle phase turned out very uninspired, I've chosen not to document the room upgrade. Nothing really seemed to work in terms of photos. We are now pondering pulling up the linoleum and painting the floor before I actually paint the trim along the floor. Today Evan pulled up some of it and there was a layer of newspaper underneath -- the date was 1968. Maybe I'll take some photos of that stage, or at least of the finished room.

As mentioned, with Evan's gracious help (he's got projects of his own ... continuing to finish the kitchen and building a shelf for Nate ... also not in very photogenic stages right now), I've crept along with this project mainly while Nate naps on weekends (there were also a few Nate naps over the holidays when I snuck in a few hours of work on the room).

So, here's a view of something much more inspiring than my slow progress on the bedroom -- it's the view of the mountain, this morning, following a snowfall of a few inches that we got yesterday.

The leaves are suddenly blown away, the clouds are moving along fast -- it could be March, or November. Alas, it's November... and five or six long months until springtime even starts to tease us.

Meanwhile, the pond, the mountain, the land around us is all growing more serious as we move through fall, though still hints of beauty.

We had a light frost earlier this fall, but not a "hard" frost. In other words, what struck was a frost that killed off the end of the tomato plants, the beans, and a few other more sensitive parts of the garden.

The day before, I got a few last good photos of the garden.

Here are the beets, behind some spinach:

The beets are actually still limping along post-frost. I'm wondering if a frost makes beets taste better? I'll have to pull them up soon, though -- I wouldn't want to risk losing them. And the tops are starting to look feeble.

Here was the garden, pre-frost.

The falling-over beans plant in the front, and the flowers (Mexican marigolds), bit the dust. To the right of the beans are some beets. In addition to the spinach, of which I have several rows (at various stages of maturity), I also still have a couple plantings of swiss chard and turnips.

But, sadly, I spent most of last weekend's garden time doing the least pleasant stuff: pulling up the dead tomato stalks, herbs, etc., and generally cleaning up in preparation for winter.

I believe he has some outside-the-house caulking to complete on the seventh window and, like, the second window that he installed. But for the most part, window installation for this year is done! We (well, Evan) have/has more windows to do next year, but first we want to take a minute to bask in the heat that's no longer fast running out the cracks in our bedroom windows.

Just in time, too. Last night we had our first frost!

So far, we've roasted them with potatoes, and next week I plan on making some more turnips -- this time trying on the stove, in a glazed form (in other words, cooked in butter), with some parsley.

The beets are also looking great, though they are a few weeks behind the turnips. Hopefully will be picking the beets in, oh, two weeks or so...

For every success, we have some flops. For instance, the beans never really came through this year...

There are occasionally some big ole snapping turtles surfacing in the pond or the mud by the stream; this little guy was only a few inches long.

They were all very beautiful, similar in size and jewel-like:

We dunked them in hot water then shocked them in cold water so they were easy to peel. Next we packed them in jars with lemon juice and hot water. Then loaded the jars into the hot water bath canner.

After a few hours of this, I also tried my hand at a batch of chutney which required 10 cups of tomatoes (I used large red ones, several varieties), plus cucumber, onion, red pepper, vinegar and some other ingredients.

In the end both canning projects turned out OK, though I think the chutney was a little runny. Here are the quart jars of tomatoes, in front; behind are the pint jars of chutney.

After all of that, I wasn't sure I'd do any more. But the tomatoes just keep coming. So I cooked down another huge kettle of them -- I'm thinking they will be the last for this year -- and hope to put them up tomorrow night.

During this whole process, Evan and I remarked to each other that the massive canning project(s) would not have been possible on our old tiny stove, pre-kitchen renovation!

The fact that we cook every day, or nearly every day, is actually pretty special on its own -- but if we posted about that with any diligence, this would cease to be a house blog and would be just a blog about what we're cooking every day.

However, in the past few days an abundance of tomatoes has led us to a cooking arena which is off our normal routine. We broke out the hot water bath canner (and a trusty canning/preserving cookbook) and put up some tomatoes.

We actually had buckets and buckets of tomatoes. Here are some of them, including heirlooms. We also had tons of plum tomatoes:

After we cooked down the most ripe ones, Evan put them through the food mill. We then cooked that sauce some more:

Then we ladled them in quart jars with 2 tbsp of lemon juice apiece. We ended up with five quart jars, which we put in the canner for 35 minutes. Here they are before I lowered the canning rack into the canner for processing:

I burned myself a couple times on hot water. And the kitchen got very hot. We actually did the cooking and canning at night, which was good because the temperature was lower overall, so it only got to like 90 in the kitchen.

After they'd processed in boiling water for 35 minutes, I let them sit in the canner for another five minutes, then extracted them from their steaming bath so they could sit quietly overnight. Voila!

Not sure what we're going to do with the old windows:

So, three windows down -- five more to go. And maybe next year we'll do another five or so, after we see how these survive the winter. Yes, we've got that many more windows to replace.

For now, we are overjoyed at how nice the new windows look. Viewing them from inside (these are all in the living room), they look clean and sturdy. And, unlike the old windows, you can open them. Ah, nice to feel a breeze in the house...