Priorities.

A lot of people are excited about fall but I am not one of them. Do I like fall? Sure. But to me it mostly just means that summer is over and The White Death is coming. I'd rather have year round spring, summer, and fall that goes directly into spring. So you'll pardon me if my excitement over pumpkin lattes is a little subdued.

You are either looking at the butterfly... or the weeds. 

I can only see the weeds in my end-of-summer freak out.

Fall also means that I need to get my ducks in a row. And when I say "ducks" I really mean chickens. Our meat management this year has not been up to snuff.

We ended up getting the pigz very very late this year. One of the reasons was our extremely bad planning but also because of the "Summer That Almost Wasn't." The constant rains earlier in June were all bad news. Pigz would have been swimming in mud if we had gotten them earlier in the spring. So while late pigz are not optimal from a meat planning point of view - it was better for the pigz.

Late pigz mean late butchering which means we need to make sure we have alternative meat lined up. The other day I was out there counting the last of our meat chickens from spring. We only have six left. We might be in a pickle.

So my highest priority this week is to secure a new round of meat chickens. Actually, I'll probably get one round now and another in a couple weeks. This is cutting it pretty close but we'd rather have winter than summer creepy meats. We find it's easier to keep them warm than to keep them cool - and the fatties really fatten up over the winter with nothing to do but sit around and eat.

This tomato wants to be picked and canned.

Next, I have about a billion tomatoes that I need to deal with. However, I don't see any time for canning in my near future so I'm going to try something different which is to put the tomatoes in bags and into the freezer. This way I can buy myself some time and do canning later in the fall when there is not a lot going on.

Third, I'm totally off my green bean game. A gal I know grows the best beans in the business and I had hoped to get a bushel from her. But she told me on Saturday that she had picked her last beans and they were already sold to someone else. Rats! So I'll be hitting the auctions this week trying to secure at least a bushel.

Of course, everyone has had a bad growing season so I've noticed that the produce is getting a little thin everywhere. We just couldn't catch a break this summer.

Nothing but constant rain early caused just about everything to drown... then we had dry dry dry conditions. And now nothing but 90* days. We've had a little bit of rain in the last couple of days and thank heavens for that.

I spoke to my orchard friends and they let me know that the little bit of rain we got probably saved their harvest! The apples would have started falling off the trees because of the lack of water...and they can't sell or harvest any apples from the ground (thanks, weird government regularions....). So, for now anyway, they are back in business.

Fourth, I really need to start working on repairs in the chicken and turkey houses. Who knows what kind of winter we will get but we need to get our property ship shape. Right now my work area can only be described as "they appears to have been some kind of struggle." My tools are everywhere and nothing is put away.

And forget any of the building or painting projects we wanted to get done.

Pretty much I need an extra month, in addition to September and October, to be really caught up. And we haven't even thought about firewood.

Fall speeds up before it slows down.

Happy Labor Day everyone! There is no day off around here... this holiday is just another labor day for me. Any one else scrambling to get caught up?