We are heading into an early fall

No not a fall "down", but fall the season after summer. I am pretty sure grapes don't get ripe till sometime in September around here but mine were all ripe. Rodger went to the garden last evening to check on the tomatoes and see if we had ripe ones. He did pick a few so we have enough to use fresh with meals. When he came back in I ask him to help me pick the grapes. We cut the clusters off the vines with pruning shears. We had 3 of these half bushel baskets full of nice big sweet grapes.

This is the pic of 2 of the baskets, the other is already in the sink for washing. Yeah we still need to get the green beans put in the cellar. Rodger helped me make juice after we got the grapes picked.

We got 10 quarts of nice thick juice from those and still had a half bushel left to do. We finished off the last basket full this evening and made juice with those too. Ended up with 10 more quarts of juice. As concentrated as the juice is I do think it will need water added when we drink it. Not much work to produce grapes and not much to make juice. We only have 6 mature grape vines producing right now with 30 plus young vines that are not producing yet. I guess all in all these grapes were grown by organic methods as they had no fertilizer or chemicals on them. If I need to I can make grape jelly later but for now we still have plenty of grape jelly in the cellar. I chose not to make wine this year. The juice is more versatile anyway. I rather wait and make some raspberry wine. I need to check on the raspberries to see if they are ripening yet. I think they should be. The plants had lots of raspberries on them a couple weeks ago when we checked them. I should have a bumper crop of those this year too with all the nice rain we have had. As matter of fact it was raining lightly when I came in the house a lil bit ago, shortly after dark. If has been so nice and cool at night I think I will start opening windows at night an shutting off the central air. Might try that for a few nights to see how bad our allergies act up. Its nice to sleep with open windows and listen to the night critters at night. So nice to live in the country where you can do that.

Not much else happening here, so till next time, blessings from the McGuire homestead.

Stella