Mellow fruitfulness

I canned four pints of tomato salsa yesterday. There's twice that much in the freezer already, so we got quite a bounty from one tired Roma plant.  I can't bring myself to waste a single homegrown tomato and that seemed best, since we go through at least a jar of salsa a week.

On the news we watch the drenching rain in the East, but our dry, warm weather goes on as signs of fall appear. The mornings are dark and there's condensation on the windshields, although the "season of mists" is more like the season of smoke, drifting down from forest fires in British Columbia. The sky looks like dirty dishwater. The air is unhealthy. Ugh.

It's raining cherry tomatoes though. They're sweet as candy but even more than I can eat, which is saying something.  The plums are almost ripe, and it turns out more than I thought, although most are inconveniently high up in the tree. We have a handy-dandy picker on a pole, so can get a few of them.  I'll have plenty for chutney and something else, if I get more ambitious.

Apples, apples, apples. Hundreds of tiny ones, each with its own personal worm inside. Rachel was asking about our unpleasant "apple maggot quarantine" signs, and here it is in living color. The tree should be thinned early in the year, I just never get around to it. Then I'd have large wormy apples instead of small wormy apples.  Farming is a lot of work, which is why I love our flowers.  I'll be picking up rotting little apples until November.

Speaking of, there's a nice second bloom going on the roses...

I've already started the long process of cleaning vegetation from the flower beds. Actually I like this time of year in the garden, and seeing a little space between plants again.  The tired gardener takes a deep breath and looks ahead to the coming season, whatever it may bring.

Autumn
John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.