September-October Update, Part 2

The summer and fall seasons here, like much of the nation, were very very dry.   Up here in the forest, drought has more serious consequences than a lost crop.  If the dry forest catches fire, it can easily burn your home to the ground. 

In fact, there were a couple of nasty lighning-sparked forest fires upwind of us in the Okanagan and Cascades.  Most of the summer was miserable with smoke from fires over 200 miles away from us!  Nasty air...



Because of the drought, I became worried enough about how close several trees were to the house.  The recommendation is to clear trees for 30 feet, and to thin them out to 100 feet.  So I got going with the chainsaw.  I now need to re-sharpen the chain and remove the fallen trees.

 

We grew a tomato plant this summer from a small seedling.  It grew a lot of tomatoes, but they weren't ripening quickly enough to get any before the first frost would arrive.  We put the plant on a roller cart and started bringing it into the garage each night.  As a result, it was able to provide us with some wonderfully tasty tomatoes, and it still has a few ripening up!

Autumn arrived, and the fall colors have been beautiful.  I haven't had the opportunity to stop and take a picture of any of the aspen groves around here, but I did take a couple of the tamarack pines on the property.  I never knew any pine trees turned yellow and lost their leaves...