First Frost

"The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth."- D. H. Lawrence

It got a little nippy last night. The temps were 30.7 when I woke up.The sun was just melting the last vestiges of our first frost from the grass at 10 AM when I went to my mothers.

I stripped the squatter’s right apple tree on Sunday so no apples will be falling. I stored some of the apples and have some here to dehydrate and bake with. The apples had already started falling heavily which is what spurred me on to get them before they all fell and bruised. The horseradish should be ready now –maybe tomorrow I will tackle that. The sauerkraut has approximately two more weeks and then canning will be done for another year.

Archery hunting season started here on Saturday so we did not get to walk the upper ridge. Instead we spent the weekend buying more feed, hay and groceries, picking up #2 son’s .22, moving all of mom’s outside furniture into the garage, digging more potatoes and sorting the first ones dug. And before we knew it the weekend was over.

In fiber news, HMG released a shawl pattern on Saturday. It is on Ravelry here… http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/dana-marr-shawl. I am using lace weight and have 50 of 160 rows done. This has me glued but I only work on it during spare moments while the kids are in school. I learned my lesson after having to tink a row back.

We have also done some shopping for the house, more grout, tiles for the back splash, switch covers, lights and stove pipe to hook up the stove to the triplewall pipe. However, dentist and doctor appointments, drives to boy scouts and fire department meetings have kept us from putting it all to use. If we want to be in before the snow flies we had best get motivated.