Powered by cake

I know that is a pretty cryptic title, but the fact is  we have been eating a heck of a lot of cake around The Havens lately.  In addition to it being the Vernal Equinox, it was Jim’s birthday the other day.  When I asked him what kind of cake he wanted he said “carrot”.   So I made a carrot cake, and if I say so myself it is delicious.   I adapted the recipe slightly by adding shredded ginger, minced crystallized ginger and dried powdered ginger to the mixture.   We had cake on his birthday (Of course!) and then the next morning we had cake for breakfast.   Actually, when you analyze it a carrot cake is pretty nourishing.   You have to count the calories though.   I figured it out and this cake was cut into 18 pieces.   Each piece is 333 calories.

So, then we had a great squash soup with cake for lunch, for dinner there was  squash soup, meat loaf sandwiches on fresh French bread and cake.  Today we sort of held it down to a dull roar and only had cake once.

I noticed that I haven’t posted since Saturday!   I just haven’t had the time or energy to get a blog post together since then.  There were several times when I chose to sit out in my nice garden chair rather than blogging.   But trust me, we haven’t just been sitting around since last Saturday.  During that time, we accomplished a very great deal.   There has been quite a lot of progress made on the rock and mortar wall.

That is the south facing wall, into which we have taken care to put as many rocks that have great crystals in them as possible.  Tomorrow we will bring the south wall up to the level of the west and north walls.   Maybe if we have time and energy we will also complete the first level on the east wall tomorrow.  I’m pretty fond of the center part of this side.   There was a special heart-shaped rock I found out in the vineyard a couple of years ago, and it found a great spot almost in the direct center of the wall.

Let’s see.   What else have we been doing?  Hmmm.   Oh yeah, one of our friends gave us two beer flats full of ripe jalapeño peppers, and they have been roasted and combined with freshly roasted tomatoes and made into chipotles.   We canned 6 pints of that.   Some of the roasted jalapeños are in the dehydrator.   When they are dry we will grind them for chipotle powder.

We were blessed with over three inches of rain this week, most of it fell on Monday afternoon.    Oddly enough, the weatherman predicted that all the rain would stay south and we were probably going to have a partly cloudy day with a 40% chance of showers.    The grasses in the Petite Prairie were beautifully decked when there was a break in the rain.

The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party looked pretty cool drenched.

The Rain Garden had water in it almost all afternoon.

Recently over on her blog, Yolanda Elizabet asked the age old question:  “Do you have a September showstopper in your garden?” Well, the answer is, I do.  It is that aster that you see in the lower right corner of the above picture.   No matter what angle you look at it from, it is a real eye-catcher.

The other asters out by the pond are show stoppers as well.   There is a path through the asters that leads back behind the water fall where I can service the pump and filter.   Ruby is standing on that path.

You have to be gentle when you go back there.   Not only are these asters show stoppers, they are real crowd pleasers.   The bees don’t mind if you move the branches of flowers, as long as you do it slowly.

I haven’t just been eating cake and making rock walls, though.   I’ve been clearing out the finished leaves and stalks from the day lily bed along the fence.   This required a lot of weeding, and for a change of pace I decided to clear up Squash Hill.   While I was clearing out the finished squash vines from squash hill, I disturbed a wolf spider.   I noticed her as she scurried away from a place where she had been hunting under the squash vines.  She was in fear for her life since I was tromping about that bed, rooting up bermuda grass and other weeds, and generally throwing my weight around.   She was quite burdened with her egg case.  The following picture was one I got after she made it back to her home and had settled down a bit.   I’m sure she thought it was pretty hairy out there for a while.   But she and her egg case are quite intact.

I will close with the picture of a moulted dove feather I noticed clinging to the salvia that are still blooming by the bird bath.

Enjoy the first days of fall.  We sure have been.

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