Sold our house, poked some cherries, and autumn is coming

It’s been a great couple of weeks! Here are some highlights:

House

First, we FINALLY sold our house in Nova Scotia! It was a long, expensive, stressful year with a empty house 4 time zones away. Now a wonderful young family owns it and we couldn’t be happier knowing there is someone else living in the house who will love it as much as we did.

I thought it would be instant relief, but it seems to be taking a bit to sink in. I wonder if it is going to feel like we got huge raises without funnelling so much of our income to Nova Scotia.

I also feel a bit like we’ve done what everyone else does when they are 60+ years old and their kids have finally moved out. We skipped the kids, drastically downsized earlier in life, sold our big house, and now we live in a little rental house in a touristy town where people come to have their summer vacation 🙂

Cherries

There is a man who drives a fruit truck up here from the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia every two weeks. Last week when he was here I got a huge bag of cherries, oranges, and peaches. The cherries are awesome! But after snacking on them for a couple days and barely making a dent, I knew I had to do more!

They aren’t the kind you would traditionally bake with, but a found a recipe that is basically like rhubarb crisp, but with cherries, and instead of an crumbly base, it used more of a biscuit recipe on top. Perfect! But I don’t have a cherry pitter!

I Googled for a solution and ended up using an empty beer bottle, placing a cherry on top, and then plunging a sharp stick you use to hold olives in your drink (why do we own this?), and poking the pit through the cherry and into the beer bottle.

It worked pretty well! I did end up with stained hands, but that’s okay! Here’s how it looked:

Rhubarb and my Garden

Rhubarb seemed to be just a spring treat other places I’ve lived, but they seem to have it at our farmer’s market here every weekend. I keep meaning to freeze it, and somehow it ends up chopped up and in a rhubarb crisp in the oven. It just happened again. Smells delicious!

My garden hasn’t had a great July. My tomato plants were so big and green in June, but this month they got so yellow and I just assumed somehow the pails I planted them in weren’t draining, because we’ve had so much rain. Finally I did a bit of research to discover a lack of nitrogen could also be the cause. Duh! Now with a couple fertilizer doses, they are doing WAY better. They are just cherry tomato plants so hopefully we can still get a good harvest before any frost hits (first frost was August 3rd last summer!). My cucumber had a late start and it is flowering, but I don’t know if there is enough time!

On the other hand, the herbs are almost unrecognizable! 24 hours of light grew oregano and sage with GIANT leaves. My basil and chives are doing really nice too.

We aren’t supposed to have a greenhouse or a garden in the ground at this rental house, but we’re already scheming for how we can do better next year. Luckily we have so many great produce growers at our farmer’s market!

Grayling

We’ve had some incredible meals this week. A moose roast. A caribou roast. Cherries. Rhubarb. And twice we’ve had Arctic Grayling that Jeff caught. So far I haven’t managed to catch one. It is both awesome and frustrating to fish when you can see the fish. I just keep casting and casting trying to entice the fish. Sometimes I even bonked them on the head or back with the hook and lure.

Can you see the fish in the next photo? Look between those fireweed flowers and the stick above them floating in the river. He is likely still there right now because he refused to be caught.

But these 3 Jeff caught pretty easily! They were delicious!

Autumn

It feels like fall is coming quickly now. Last night, after midnight, we were packing some things for our fishing trip today, and we had to turn the lights on!!!! The lights!

We’ve seen some trees looking a bit yellow when we’re travelling to our fishing hole up the Dempster. Soon we’ll have frost, cranberries to pick, and Jeff will be hunting. Actually hunting season starts tomorrow!

We’ve had rain every day for weeks. I haven’t spent enough time outside soaking up sun this summer! This week there is no rain in the forecast, so here’s hoping this forecast sticks! I have a few more freckles ready to hatch before my skin retreats beneath my winter wear!