I've been chipping away at the project list trying to get the place ready for winter. I've finished about half of the fall tree pruning and I'm hoping to have the rest done by the end of the week. Made a big dent in cleaning up the clutter in the bomb room at Pops' house to make space for winter produce storage. Made a few repairs yesterday to the fence around the riding arena. Ordered a twin-screw load of manufactured sand, which I'm hoping will arrive today, to refresh the footing along the rail.
I'm mostly finished putting up peppers from the garden. I ran ~15lbs through the smoker over the weekend. I still need to grind them, but they're plenty dehydrated so there's no rush on that. Mrs. Augie stuffed a dozen of the Big Chilis with a cheesy taco meat mix and wrapped them in bacon yesterday evening. I tossed them on the smoker long enough to cook the bacon nice and crispy and ho-lee cow were they good. There were way more than we could use so I took the excess (two large paper grocery bags full to the brim) to the office last week and put them on the break room table.
Got my garlic in the ground on Saturday (150-ish cloves) and gave it a nice blanket of composted horse poo. It's been a few years since the garden received a fresh layer of compost so I went back over it yesterday and filled in the space between the rows. The tomatoes are still hanging on, but if the weather guessers are right they will all be dead by morning. Nighttime low temps in the mid 20s are predicted for the next two nights. I'll use the old run the sprinkler all night trick to try to save the sweet corn.
Since I was already working on board fence and had all my tools out it seemed like a good time to work on planter boxes in the greenhouse. I ran out of daylight before I finished, but it won't take much to complete. I'm hoping to grow some salad greens in there during the winter.
