The garden has been slowing down, which has actually felt welcome by Jeff and I. We’ve been wanting (and needing) to focus a lot of our energy on our business right now, but there’s still plenty of preserving going on and small garden harvests being brought in every few days. Jeff and Bracken harvested our very first pumpkin, which Bracken has been keeping a close eye on. We planted a few for fun this year. Jeff harvested a bunch of nettles from down below and dried them. Pretty much every time he makes tea, he puts nettles in it, so we like to keep lots of dried nettles in the pantry. When we found ourselves with an overabundance of zucchini, he dried some of that too, planning on using it in soups in the winter. Later he said to me that if he would have added garlic powder, they probably would taste amazing for snacking. We’ll try that next time. We’re letting some of our runner beans go to seed, since they hid from us until they got too large to eat, and we like to save seeds every year anyway. Bracken loves to pick the big ones in his reach and take out the colorful beans to admire.

  We’re really looking forward to letting the chickens and ducks loose in the garden for their annual garden clean up duty. But it’s not quite time yet. We want to let everything finish up first. We’re talking about where to plant garlic and we’ll need to keep that area fenced. On Sunday we had some sunshine (after a lot of rain last week) and we harvested our mason bee cocoons. They are leaf cutter mason bees so the cocoons are wrapped in leaves. Not all of them are good (and we probably should have harvested them sooner), but we did get some for next season. We plan to keep them cool through the winter and then hatch out our spring and summer mason bees next year. This was our first year raising them and we definitely want to have them in our garden again next year. While we were gathering our cocoons, Jeff heard a swarm of bees in a tree in our backyard. At first I didn’t hear them, but then Bracken and I got really quiet and suddenly they sounded so loud and we were able to spot them way high up in the tree.

Cold weather is in the forecast for tonight so I decided to harvest the last of our basil in the garden. I also brought our little lemon tree onto the front porch, which I’ve been meaning to do.

Those are a few of the garden things that have been happening around here lately, but onto the other news: you’re probably wondering about the changes to the blog. Were you wondering: where’s all the green? Where am I? You’re still in the right place. Welcome to WoolyMossRoots’ new online home! This is something I’ve been dreaming about for years. I started this blog in 2009 on blogspot. I’m grateful for the space it provided for me all those years (and for free nonetheless.) The longer I blogged, though, the more I wanted to move my blog somewhere else. For many reasons, but just one example being that many readers found it challenging to leave comments. I started using something called Intense Debate to make it easier, but then comments came through two different avenues. If I published the comments through blogger than it would delete all other comments. Sound confusing? It was. So, for many reasons, I was really ready to move on. But I’ve been blogging for five years and I have a lot of content and a lot of pictures. I’ve poured a lot of heart and soul into my blog over the years and I was nervous to move it somewhere else, to say the least. I’d heard some stories about content getting messed up or lost and yikes, I didn’t want that to happen. That’s where Jeni came in. She moved my blog from blogspot to WordPress and she really knows what she’s doing. (She was so thorough, her communication was great, and I would highly recommend working with her if you want to move to WordPress.) I’m really happy to say my blog is now located at: www.woolymossroots.com, (if you go to the blogspot address it will bring you straight here), which is a dream come true for me. I’m just settling into my new space, getting it all figured out, and I’m looking forward to doing some design work. I think you will find it much easier to leave comments now, so if you had troubles before, please try again. Also, you can enter your e-mail in the sidebar and get updates every time a new post is published. Welcome, welcome to the new space. So glad to have you here!