Hey there,
A cooler and rainy couple days after that blast of summer heat is welcome, it was getting pretty dry out there. But don't misunderstand, I love a long warm fall, helps us finish off the summer crops and enjoy the cooler fall crops without fear of them frying in a frost.
A great rainy day task is organizing the garage which is where we cure and clean the onions and garlic. The onions are dried on the tables you can see leaning by the tractor and stacked in the garage once cured, and the garlic is hung in bundles over the rafters in the roof. Here I'm cleaning and sorting garlic while Liam is drawing pictures on a piece of wood, getting ready for the Rural Romp.
Then we slowly go through and clean and get them ready for you guys, or in the case of garlic, we go through and pull out the nicer heads to plant out for the next years crop. Once we pick these out, we crack them open into individual cloves and wait for a nice day around thanksgiving to plant.
Once planted we then tuck them in with straw mulch for the winter to protect them from the harshest weather and help suppress weeds.
Back in the garage, because it is unheated, we have to move all the onions, garlic and squash into a new home for the winter. But once they are out of the garage we store hay, chicken feed, freezers for meat and pretty it up for the wreath and urn making sessions we host in the winter. The onion tables turn into tables loaded with evergreen boughs, red dogwood and pinecones for people to make their own holiday decorations. One of my favourite things is seeing the seasons change, and how the different tools and spaces we have change with them.
