Frost threatened on September 27th and came on the 28th.

Frost means our gardens are mostly done.

We stripped our cabbages, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and green beans. I made a wonderful soup from chicken broth, cabbage, green beans, tiny potatoes and kielbasa.

The low-lying wildflowers survived.

We spent Monday, the 26th, reducing our overburden of roosters. The cold means living in tighter quarters. Peace in the coop becomes ever more important. The Wyandottes were 20 weeks old and averaged 4 pounds, the chicks incubated by Lil’ Blackie were 10 weeks old and averaged 2 pounds, and the broilers at 8 weeks old averaged 8 pounds.

We have had several broilers die on us. Doing the evisceration, I noticed the smaller ones had internal plumbing aberrations. Because the broilers are genetically related, every year’s hatch seem to share certain characteristics, both for good and bad. Even though we would have liked to grow the broilers a bit more, the weather and the morbidity rate said the time for harvest was now.

We picked the last of the apples on Wednesday and pressed more cider. I think we went through 60 gallons of apples to make 8 gallons of cider. Michael took about 6 and a half gallons to make apple wine. I boiled the leftovers and made apple cider syrup.

Pancakes with fresh syrup was what we had for dinner. Michael said it tasted like sour apple candy. Ten cups cider filled my wok. It made two cups of syrup. I’m not sure I would do this again, or I might try it with different apples. It is very intense.

The frost killed the squash and pumpkin vines. I harvested the last of the potatoes I had planted in the straw pile. We haven’t counted up our squash harvest, but it appears plentiful. We suffer from cross pollination with the giant pumpkins. Good thing they are tasty, even if ridiculously sized.

We will feed pumpkin to all our cutie pies.