This earth remains beautiful. The sun still rises every morning. And, there is still work to do. Life goes on (it must!), no matter who we elect on the second Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

It’s mid-November, and our garden is still making food. This week we have broccoli, kale, the best spinach I’ve ever grown, lettuce, arugula, and chard, plus four goumi berries (our first). The hoop house is really working out.

Hyssop, red yarrow, viola, and mullein have put out fresh blooms, while the asters fade.

In the woods, witch hazel is still blooming.

Three very confused sheep laurel plants up on the Crag are also blooming. These same plants did the same thing last fall, too.

The mums continue to delight me as well as a variety of beetles and flies.

Yard work has mainly consisted of mowing and piling up the grass clippings and leaves on the hugelkultur bed, but we also reinstalled vole guards around the fruit trees and cleaned up the weedy areas around them to try to eliminate vole habitat. In a move that our neighbor warned us we’d regret, we used dead trees found in the woods as fence posts and birdhouse poles when we put them up two years ago. Sure enough, one tall bluebird box and two fence posts rotted off and fell over within the last two weeks. This week found us adding metal posts and replanting the birdhouse (we had made it absurdly tall so the neighbors’ abundant cats would be dissuaded from climbing it; this is no longer an issue, so it is okay that it is a normal height now).  We expect it and other posts to rot off over the coming years. So be it.

I find that I must get into the woods and take a hike as often as possible!