September Gardening

I have finally found some time to get out in my garden.  These are photos of arum seeds, Irish heather and the grapes.  We are eating yellow plums, little tomatoes that grow on the deck, and we have the first fig in the house ready for eating.  I picked the red currants, put them through the juicer, and got about half cup of juice.  In cleaning up the bowls and juicer I added about another cup of water.  I added a cup of sugar and boiled this mix for about 3 minutes.  I now have two small jars of yummy red currant jelly.  This is labor intensive, but there is a lot of satisfaction in using your own produce. 

I mowed the grass paths and the back.  I clipped back the fig off the paths.  That thing grows madly.  It seems I should be watering my deck stuff everyday.  Oh well, its not doing too badly with its weekly watering. The path I renovated in the back, by adding stepping stones is looking good and is much better for walking on.  The stones were too uneven to use in this spot.  The pond is doing okay.  I like the covering of duck weed.  Its a nice refreshing green.  The whole garden needs watering and more weeding, of course.  The weather predictions are for another week of good weather, but cooler at nite.  The days are getting shorter quickly.

This is a photo from our 10 day trip to Barkerville, the gold rush town.  I have changed this to a sepia to make it look like the 1860s.  The trip was quite an adventure.  We drove up to Port Hardy and caught the ferry to Bella Coola.  We had to spend the night on the parking lot at Bear Cove terminal, as there were high seas and we could not leave on schedule.  We got on the next day at 5:00 pm.  Since we were behind schedule we did not get to spend any time ashore at the communities where the ferry stops.  We spent the next night in the camper van, on the ferry, though we were not suppose to be down there.  The weather was overcast and rainy so all the beautiful scenery was a wash out.  After getting off the fairy we found a wonderful campsite at the Gnome's Home just out of Bella Coola.  The next day we drove 'over the hill' which is a narrow, winding gravel road over the mountains.  I was scared skinny. The rest of the trip up to Barkerville was good, with good food, good campsites, fine scenery.  Barkerville was interesting, and we spent to half days there.  On the way home we took the Duffy Lake Road back over the mountains.  Another winding road over the mountains.  This one was paved with good shoulders and some turn outs.  But it had 11% downgrades with 20 km hairpin turns.  Our brakes were smokin'.  The scenery was spectacular!  We got back on Sunday the 28th.  I have been catching up on home and garden, and my rest. 

I have been spending a bit of time on Megashot.  Its always fun.  I never seem to have enough time to do all the things I want to do!