Calling it.   The last of my summer crops has finally given in to the cold nights.  This weekend is going to bring a few 30-degree nights, I think, and even the new pods are starting to mottle brown.  The blooms have dropped off.

I haven’t pulled them up yet.  That’ll be a Saturday job.   Turn them into the compost bins.  Fold the leaves that my boys have been piling and exploding and piling again into the raised bed.  I’ll head up to the school over Break and clean up the straw bales that a PTO mom stacked up for October decoration.   Those will turn into mulch for the strawberries, the blackberries, the beds.   If I have enough, I’ll stack it aside for compost layers.

The basil has gone fully to seed and dried.   I’ll clip a few heads off and put them in the box with the dried okra pods that rattle with promise.  .  .  any two of the dozen or so I kept would be sufficient.   Today, to get ahead of the freeze, I took the last of the still-tender pods no matter what their size.   Canned my last two jars of pickled okra just now and waiting on the lids to pop.   I ate the last couple of blackberries that turned black just in time.   I hope to get up early enough to get a picture of frost on the red ones, if it gets that cold.   May not.

Watering the plants in the greenhouse today I saw a small grey and black camouflaged tree frog perched on the edge of a blueberry pot (The first lid just popped!) and moved a shallow pot down and filled it with a little extra water.   Maybe he’ll winter over in the greenhouse.  Maybe he was just hopping in for a look-around.

I’m excited about Winter coming, even though my heart is always Spring and Autumn.   We didn’t get snow last year and it would be nice to get a little this year.  Just enough to really make me yearn for those first green glimpses of daffodils at the end of it all.

(The second one just popped . . . let me go get my camera, I’m proud of these two.)