Monday...

Spent the weekend gardening and observing the Equinox, first with SBGH and then at home. The latter observance was yesterday, when we planted a plum tree in the front yard (no more room for fruit trees in the back) and had our regular fire at sunset.

The crocuses in the back part of the garden are now blooming so exuberantly that even periodic squirrel attacks can't suppress them entirely:



That's it for now.

-GRG

Equinox

We celebrated the equinox with a tomato harvest. A number of the small-tomato type plants -- Isis, Red Pear, Purple Russian, Green Zebra, and two of the Red Zebra / Speckled Romans -- were done for the season, so we picked the usable fruit and cleaned up the beds. The Red Zebra and Striped Roman next to the corn are still carrying a lot of green fruit, so we left them to get on with it. We also picked all the big Hillbillys and Brandywines that were ripe. We had one of those along with corn and squash from the garden for the vegetable part of our celebration feast. And yesterday I canned ten pints of tomatoes! This has been a very gradual autumn in Denver -- still no frost, although it's been close a couple of times -- and we're now having the sort of warm, dry weather that we usually get after all the tomato plants are dead. Don't know how long it will last.

On the writing front, things are still going well: I finished chapter 15 today -- half the projected total -- and started the next. Figures on the sidebar as always.

Happy equinox!

-GRG

Tomato harvest...

Remember those little tomato seedlings in the cold frame last spring? Most of them did rather well -- especially the Hillbillys. I've canned 9 pints already and will be doing more this weekend, when we celebrate the Equinox with some garden harvesting activity.

And I've got 3 pages written so far of Chapter 15.

Autumn Equinox

The autumn equinox falls on September 23rd this year. Some years it is on the 22nd. Theoretically the day and night are of equal length that day, although I find it tends to vary a bit depending on where you live, like the solstices.

The equinoxes are also the time in the year when the length of the days and nights is changing fastest. Here in Denver that amounts to about two and a half minutes per day, but in northern Europe it's faster - almost four minutes per day in London, four and a half minutes in Edinburgh, close to five in Inverness, and over five in the Orkneys. I saw this when I lived in Juneau (5 minutes per day) where it really made an impression on me - the day/night cycle there is like a great tide of light, rising and falling with the seasons, all of life borne along on it.

Tomorrow I should have another reference book review. In the meantime, may you have a good autumn (or spring in the Southern Hemisphere) day.

-GRG