Suddenly, it's October!

My how time flies. Johnny has been busy picking and freezing prunes, gathering apples and making apple cider.

Mostly Johnny has made cider alone in small batches so far. The yellow jackets have been too thick to invite others over. However they are considerably thinned now and a few days ago neighbor Irv helped so he "felt okay about taking home cider."

 Here Irv adds a little warm water to the apple washing barrel.

And pushes them through the grinder, giving Johnny a break.

I've been canning bread and butter pickles and tomatoes, picking grapes and cherry tomatoes and other garden goodies, trimming goat feet, mowing weeds, plus the usual milking and cleaning barns, and, until the last two days, watering the garden and new arboretum trees frequently as we have not had rain except a few drizzles.

Yesterday, the last day of September, we took a day off to drive up the road, hunt for Dippers and admire the fall colors.

The Chutes had very little water but was pretty, nonetheless.

Here Johnny took a photo of me climbing up from The Chutes. All those rocks below me are usually covered with water.

 Even low, Agency Creek is beautiful, especially with fall colors beside it.

We only found two Dippers, although the others were likely there, just hard to detect being the same color as all those rocks sticking up now. This one was preening atop a rock.
 

 Today was back to work for Johnny and his prune operation... plus pasteurizing cider. I trimmed goat feet and hiked through the arboretum, checking out greenery for the Christmas wreaths I'll be making in another month. The smoke bushes out there have all turned pretty colors so I decided to take photos and make a post about them for another one of my blogs: Trees. Here it is: http://finkfamilyfarmtrees.blogspot.com/2018/10/smoke-bushes.html

 October is my favorite month: cooler weather, beautiful sunsets and colorful leaves and, usually, refreshing soaking rain. We're still waiting for the latter.