So I got the kids out of the house, and their room was clean before we left. No small feat, but they did accomplish it. Patti got her quiet house, mostly, while we were gone. Apparently some neighborhood kids came knocking on the door. Patti could hear them through the pillows pressed tightly over her head. The kids knocked on the front door, back door, and all of the windows before they left. Who does that? Come on. Either they are not home or they don’t want to see you. Go away.
So Nell, Claire, Phoebe and I first headed out to Homestead Orchard to see if they were going to be open this year. Fred who owns it was going to teach me tree grafting and general tree propagation and care this year, but called me last winter to tell me he was dying. Had not heard from him since. The orchard was open, and I found it is being taken over by the neighbors to the East of it who have 12 acres on that side where they keep horses. They are new at this, and I showed them how to run the cash register (yeah, I worked retail in the way-back times) and talked about getting apples this year. Not a problem. Happy to know. September is a big apple processing time, but I need a dependable source of good apples for sauces.
I bought a couple of bags of early apples, then me and the girls headed off to the Ness farm. Went pretty well with them helping me. I cut sunflower heads and they took armloads of them back to the Explorer, then they carried summer squash and a melon that was ready to pick. To finish it all up I dug up 50 feet of potato rows. These had Colorado Potato Beetle issues as well. Even worse apparently than Minnetonka. Maybe 20 pounds of potatoes we found in those rows. Dug up 5 Russian Banana Fingerling hills and didnt find a single potato. Oh well. Kenebec did ok. That seemed to do the best of the ones we dug up. Three other rows there are not dried down yet and still have a few green leaves that either the CPBs missed or have grown since the bugs disappeared. I will wait for the plants to die off before digging them up.
