September Tasks

We’ve enjoyed a series of days with very nice weather. It’s both pleasantly warm and pleasantly cool at the same time. If I’m holding still I feel cool but if I am working I feel warm. However, the National Weather Service forecast says that Wednesday night the low temperature will be 47 degrees and down to 36 degrees on Thursday night. Brrrr. I wonder if my herbs will survive the cold?

We’ve been working hard to prepare for winter. EJ harvested some of his squash during the weekend. He also dug up some turnips and potatoes. He has been checking the apples on the trees to see if they are ripe enough to pick. Not yet.

EJ also bought 5 bales of straw for the chicken coop. He was going to buy twice as many so we could use the old bales in the garden, but the price of bales has gone way high so I just added the new bales to the old ones. On Sunday he unloaded the truck and brought the bales to me while I positioned them in the coop. The chickens were curious and climbed all over the straw bales. I had to keep shooing them off before I moved the bales. Sometimes they remind me of curious little children. The chickens like to sleep on top of the bales and the straw helps insulate the coop.

During the summer Theo sometimes climbs the posts that our birdhouses are attached to and upsets the birds raising their family inside. I’ve been wanting to move the birdhouses so they are better protected from Theo and today I got started on it. We have fencing around each apple tree to protect them from the deer. The fence around each tree is held in place by three t-posts. I dug up one of the three t-posts around a tree and replaced it with a wooden post with the birdhouse on top. The post helps hold up the fence but also is inside of it which, I hope, keeps it safe from Theo. I got two posts moved and have another post to move. One of the birdhouses has deteriorated so EJ is building another to replace it. I need EJ to take another birdhouse off a permanently installed and unmovable post that Theo can easily climb and put it on top of the post I moved inside an apple tree fence. I will hang something else from that post. A bird bath or feeder, perhaps, or maybe a pot of flowers. While I had the posts out of the ground, I cleaned them out so they are ready for next year’s birds.