Jill and I have just learned how to can fruits and vegetables. You know, you put lidded, Ball jars into a big pot of boiling water? It was intimidating at first but all you have to worry about is that the jar-tops seal: they’ll let you know, by making a popping noise; then you finger the tops to make double sure.

Our canning adventure started with tomatoes: what do you do with all of those tomatoes? While the insects ate our broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, and kale down to the dirt, none of them touched the Tomatoes. Maybe it has something to do with tomatoes hailing from the poisonous nightshade family. Whatever the reason, we’ve had heaps and mounds of tomatoes. And they’re still coming.

So, now–sitting on the same antique shelves in the basement that the old farmer’s wife used–we have rows and rows of canned peaches, apples, tomatoes, and blackberry jam.

In anticipation of more canning, we planted our orchard last month: apples, peaches, apricots, and cherries. Then, on a recent field trip, we came across a pair of huge, old Pecan Trees and spent forty minutes filling bags with pecans and decided that we need a couple of pecan trees ourselves. So that’s on the list. I had no idea pecans would grow in Maryland. But, lest you forget, we are a Southern state.

Autumn is deep-discount sales season at nurseries–half or more off of trees and shrubs. So we’ve been buying lots of those, which has compelled us to do more landscaping. You can’t plant trees or shrubs without landscaping; and you can’t landscape without a plan, which means creating beds and paths and so on.

That’s a long way of saying we haven’t been working on the house. But we’ll get to it after the cold weather hits us. In the meantime, we’re building stone walls, walkways, roads, drainage ditches, and so on, with an eye to opening to the public next summer.

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