False fall

It’s been feeling like early fall lately, with milder temperatures and rain — so unlike a typical Ohio August. But summer will be back to full strength tomorrow, with temps getting into the upper 90’s in the coming days. I want to plant my fall veggies (beets and salad greens), but I’m a little reluctant to do so when it’s supposed to be so hot.

My wrist is almost completely healed now, so I can go back to doing yardwork. I was in the middle of weeding and mulching the front beds when this happened, so I can hopefully go out today and work on that. I want to take advantage of this last mild day before the heat gets cranked up tomorrow.

It’s now peak blackberry and apple season. When I’m not working, I’m picking, cleaning, and freezing blackberries. Or I’m peeling, coring, and chopping apples for applesauce or whatever. I’ve barely put a dent in the apples. We have two remaining trees (out of the seven we had originally), and just these two trees produced more apples than I can possibly use. I plan to offer some to our neighbor for her horses and donkeys and maybe leave some out for the deer in the very back of our yard where they tend to hang out.

And to think, I had no decent apples at all last year. So odd. These apples are misshapen and blemished, but they are fine for cooking. (They don’t have a good flavor for eating raw.)

The thing about working full-time now is that I don’t really have the time or energy to continually process these apples. Any applesauce I make is going into the freezer because I can’t be bothered with canning. But even making applesauce is a tedious process.

I cored and peeled four pounds of apples yesterday morning (and chopped them using my Fullstar vegetable chopper, which was definitely worth the purchase), but it made a huge mess and dirtied up a lot of dishes. I have to say, though, that homemade applesauce is a million times better than store bought.

In other news, I went out yesterday to pull up a lot of poison ivy. We have it all over the yard, and Blitz jumped right into the thickest patch two days ago. It won’t affect him at all, but I have had poison ivy once in my life, so I know I’m allergic. Anyway, this happened during my lunch break, so I didn’t have time to throw him in a tub. But we have IvyX wipes, which are supposed to remove the oil. I scrubbed him down with one and now I’m hoping for the best. I seem to remember that it took a few days to break out after I came into contact with it last time. I have no signs of a rash yet. Knock on wood.