Sage

So sage dries out FAST. I'll try to put a picture up, but it's already starting to look like the silver-gray dried bunches available at head shops and Native American museums. It's pretty cool.

Of course, it's also shedding onto the ground a little and that is crunchy underfoot and obnoxious, but oh well.

Speaking of making sauce

Two of the plants in my garden that already looked like they were starting to feel the hurt from the cold weather were my basil and pineapple sage. The sage is now hanging to dry in front of a window, from the adjustment wire of our blinds. We'll use the dried sage as a cooking herb, or burn it to purify the house, or something. or maybe it will just hang out in a vase and look and smell pretty. Maybe I'll embed it into fancy homemade candles (this last option is unlikely). Regardless, we will find a use for it.

A good use for the basil was pretty obvious. We made pesto. The other pieces of the equation (olive oil, nuts, salt, garlic) already exist in our kitchen in quantity, so we just pulled all the basil leaves off the main stem, piled/poured everything into Baum's extremely cool blender and hit "liquefy".

It turned out quite well - as things loaded with garlic, olive oil and salt tend to do.

The season's winding down...

So we are a mere two weeks or so from the projected first plant-killing frost. It seems tough to believe, since it's still often sweltering during the day. Not to mention the fact that I no longer have school in the fall to structure my time, so this year has lacked a normal sense of transition.

Well, with a plant killing frost coming up and my tomato plants still producing, my lettuces still still growing and my turnips still turniping, what am I going to do?

At my home we're transitioning from production mode to consumption mode, fast. Sick of arugula? Tough. Eat it.

I avoided space-consuming vine plats in my fall garden, like winter squashes and pumpkins, for various reasons and the result has been: lots of lettuce. And root vegetables. What am i going to do with all these radishes and turnips? The package was serious when it said radishes were easy to grow. They are running amok. The root vegetables, at least, will keep for a while. We'll have carrots, beets, turnips and radishes coming out of our ears for at least part of the winter.

No matter how many tomatoes become ripe, we manage to polish those off pretty quickly. There is the possibility, though, of having to pick a great deal of them all at once to outsmart the weather a little. In that case, I guess we'll make sauce and freeze it to have later.