Happier Thoughts and Autumn Musings

Just to show you how bipolar I can be, here is another post! Because I’m actually not depressed today, I just needed to get the previous post written down and out of my system.

Fall is here! And today! Today I am going to roast beets. And attempt to eat beet greens. Weird. I’ve only ever had them pickled. I love pickled beets. So we shall see.

I organized my cold room last night. There is something immensely satisfying about having shelves full of pickles, peaches, beets, raspberry cordial, apple juice, apple sauce, apple butter, and apple syrup.

I just have this year’s crop of beets to pickle, and I may attempt to make apple jelly again, since my apple syrup was not intentional. And then begins the tomato creations.

I enjoyed my garden this year. The last two years I have been pregnant and not allowed to move/in the hospital/wishing I was dead, when garden harvest time came around. Now I have ten foot sunflowers, eight foot corn, hills and hills of potatoes, onions drying on the ground, beans and peas in my freezer, tomatoes beginning to ripen, carrots to pick, and the whole garden is not a jungle of weeds! (Not to be confused with completely weeded.)

I absolutely love growing my own food. We butcher our own beef, we butcher our own pigs, I get eggs, chickens and turkeys from my mom-in-law – I think I could have made it as a pioneer woman! You know, so long as they had plumbing and electricity. And I didn’t actually have to be the one doing the butchering. Okay, fine, a pioneer woman I am not.

But after seven years, I am definitely growing into one of my titles. Farm wife. Sheldon and I got married almost seven years ago. I had never driven a tractor, was deathly afraid of cows, and hadn’t really grown anything. My only memory of gardening at my childhood home was planting potatoes using an auger, so obviously our soil was not ideal.

Today I can drive tractors. I can use bale forks, I can use the tractor bucket, I can haul manure (…go me…) I can bale, I can wrangle calves, I can work with cows, I can bed the barn, I can manage the financial affairs of a farm, I can plant a garden, I can process the produce, I can keep flowers alive (so long as said flowers/plants are not actually inside my house…) It’s a good life, this farm life. It’s a hard life. It’s a gamble. It’s misunderstood. It’s backed into a corner. It’s stuck between a rock and a hard spot. It’s a living. Sometimes.

But this farming thing, I swear it’s in the blood. Sheldon can’t picture himself doing anything else, and even Kadon, my little one year old, goes crazy when he hears equipment pull on the yard and loves riding with his daddy in the swather, buckled into the little buddy seat. I guess he’ll be a farmer too. I wonder if he’ll find a ready made farm wife, or if he’ll have to teach his wife everything she knows about this lifestyle.

I can’t believe I’m wondering about Kadon’s wife. But his first year went by so fast…

Time is such an odd thing. It brings about so many changes, and yet leaves so many things the same.