Fall in T or C

Haven't updated the blog for quite some time. Annie and I were talked into joining facebook and have been putting a few pictures up there but have had a few requests to post here. So, here's what we've been up to. (never end a sentence with a preposition! Here's the stuff up to which we've been)

Here's a picture Susannah sent of Bea's Halloween costume. (Matt and Bea LOVE ketchup) Batman is Bea's friend Caspar and my sister Dotty is in the middle. We didn't have any trick or treaters here as we're on an alley off the main drag and nobody finds us here, which is fine by us. We had a frost for a couple of nights around the first of November and had to pick all our tomatoes. With so many green tomatoes, we decided to do some canning and things sort of got out of hand. We met a man who has a roadside produce stand, and he's been giving us produce and taking relish, marmalade, pickles etc to sell. We won't make much money, but it helps pay for the jars. So far we've made ketchup, relish, green tomato pickles, oragnge marmalade, green tomato marmalade (don't knock it till you've tried it), pickled peppers and apple butter. We've also been roasting mild green chili's and keeping them in olive oil in the refridgerator. They're great on sandwiches. After roasting, I peel and de-seed them. They're labor intensive, but one of our new favorite foods. After I had done about 10 pounds under the broiler, Ed, our produce guy, said he would roast 40 pounds for us in exchange for some pickled peppers to sell. Processing those took me two days, but now we've got frozen peppers, canned peppers, marinated peppers, and feel quite wealthy looking at our laden shelves. The weather has definitely turned to fall here. The cottonwoods are yellow and dropping their leaves. There was ice on the birdbath this morning and even in the middle of the afternoon, there's a chill in the air. Annie is sitting out in the sun, where the temperature is in the high 50's, which feels cold to our thinned New Mexican blood. She's also taming the local wildlife.

We took a drive yesterday up to the base of Turtle Mountain. We need new shocks for our van, which isn't really built for the back roads we're exploring, but these places are way too cool to miss. We found devil's claw seed pods, which are now snagging everything in the van's back seat, and brought home a couple of hundred pounds of rock to decorate the garden. Turtleback Mountain, which we see from our door, is a 6,000 foot knob just across the Rio Grande. In the proper light it really does look like a turtle, complete with legs, tail and head.