It's autumn here: warm in the sun, cool in the shade, and flippin' cold overnight with lows in the single digits (C). The peach trees are finally bare of fruit, and the fallen, damaged fruit are so sweet and juicy that the honeybees are sucking the juice up like nectar. I wonder what peach honey would taste like? Pears are also collected, barring a handful on the Winter Nellis, and I'm giving a first go at dehydrating a couple of the Bon Cretiens today. I've left the last apples on the trees for the birds; if any remain when the dehydrator is free in a week or so, I'll try drying some apples and maybe making apple fruit leather.
I'll get probably three more batches of tomato paste made before those plants give up the ghost, and possibly one or two small batches of beans. The courgettes are producing their last fruits. The remaining corn bed (the one the cows didn't get into and raze to the ground the other night) will be ready for harvest next week. The capsicums are just now roaring into production, and the pumpkin vines starting to die back -- they'll be ready to harvest by the end of the month. The choko/chayote are starting to flower, but no sign of fruit yet.
It's a good thing we recently got a new (to us; third hand, given to us for free) much larger kitchen table, because it is purely covered with fruit, veg, and labelled cups of seeds being dried and saved for next year.
The baby chooks are at that stage where they're feathered and willing to wander away from mum for a bit, until they realise they're lost and they screech their heads off. And they're small enough to sneak under/over/through fences, so they're getting into places they ought not be. Naughty little fluffybums!
Fingers crossed that the oven-fix-it-man can fix my dead oven quickly and easily (and cheaply) on Monday.