Indian Summer

another 7 bags today and another beautiful autumn afternoon for raking. With the 7 bags from last week, total bag count is 46. Front yard is nearly complete, but the tress in the back yard have not yet dropped too many leave. So there'll be plenty of raking left to do and we'll probably be close to 60 bags by the time the snow puts an end to it. We had our first frost last week, which means that this nice weather is probably our Indian summer.

Thanksgiving Bag Count

Another 16 bags this long weekend. Mostly yellow Maple leaves and Scotch Pine needles. Total bags to date = 32. Raking leaves under the enormous maple on the corner reminded me of shovelling snow during a snow fall. No sooner have you finished, then you have to start all over again as the leaves just keep falling like snow flakes. The only way to look at is that the leaves I rake today won't have to be raked next weekend. Beautiful weather for raking though. Perfect Autumn air...fresh clear sunny days...t-shirt weather if you're working. Just like Indian Summer but we haven't had our first frost yet.

Pizza + Autumn Garden Preparations

Early yesterday morning, michele and I drove jerome to St. Jacques le Mineur where he spend the next 5 days helping with the harvesting of a family vineyard there. The vinyard is owned by the parents of one of Jerome's former highschool classmates who invited him to stay with them for his first stage (off campus work experience) of his farm management program at McGill. On the way home, we did some grocery shopping and we picked up the makings for pizza which we out off until today so that Michele would have the opportunity to serve up an excellent chicken parmigiana for last night's summer. So, we decided to serve pizza for lunch today. While Michele did the laundry and ironing, I chopped the toppings while my very reliable and handy Black+Decker bread machine chrurned the dough. I just pulled the pizza from the oven a few moments ago and it sits on the kitchen set for two where Michele and I will cut into it shortly after it has had a chance to cool down a little bit. Katherine is off working at the Univers du Tutu and Helene is off to Dix Trente to help a friend shop for clothes...apparently, he has trouble deciding on his own what he should wear. Will head off into the garden again after our pizza. Last week disposed of 5 large garden bags of garden clippings. Yesterday, I clipped another 3 bags yesterday and expect to get another 2 or 3 this afternoon which will bring this year's count to about 16 bags which is a little less than one-third of my total annual count. The leaves have just started to fall bt not yet to a degree that requires immediate raking. Will finish the clippings first and then get into the leaves next week (Canadian Thanksgiving weekend). Empied the pond and brought the fish into the solarium yesterday..they vigorously resist the transition, but once they've been installed in the warmer cleaner water of the solarium, they appear content enough. Only my two new laurel trees left to bring into the solarium. Once that's done, I can blow the hose lines and put everything away before the frost descends upon us.