October Wrap-up

 With processing DH's latest buck, plus all the normal day to day things on my docket, I'm getting this post written up almost a week later than I'd hoped.  C'est la vie. This is a busy season.

The garden is done, as in everything harvested, for the year.  I still need to pull tomato cages, stakes, and my bean pole and get them stored in the shed for the winter.  Also need to disconnect hoses and sprinklers and likewise store those.  Hoping the weather holds long enough that DH can get the garden turned under before the Fall rains make the ground too wet for tilling.

Not the best potato year, but I'll take what I can get.  Definitely a better yield than 2024.

Also not that great for squash and pumpkins, but that was more to do with deer, raccoons, wood chucks and skunks gnawing on them as they ripened rather than low production from the plants themselves.  I'm going to have to get more aggressive with critter control in 2026.

My adherence to the walking challenge I wanted to participate in wasn't a whole lot better the second half of October than it was the first half.   Some of my walks ended up being in the dark, in the woods, walking slowly bent over with a flashlight in hand searching for blood trail.  Heart pounding, yes, but not in the calorie burning way of a steady tempo upright walk. 

Here are a few pictures from daytime walks:

We've had some hard frosts, which have taken out all my flowers with the exception of the very hardy chrysanthemums.  I managed to save the last of the dahlia blossoms and bring it into the house to enjoy for a few days before it, too, faded away.  Now I need to get the tubers dug up and in storage.

I used my biggest pumpkin from this year's garden as my jack o lantern pumpkin for Halloween.  It was still quite green when I harvested it a few weeks prior, and was not quite orange when I carved it on the 30th.  

Didn't really matter once the sun went down on Halloween and I had a candle lit inside of it.  Looked 'regular' then.  LOL.

When I carved it, I saved the pieces cut from the eyes, nose and mouth.  Those I peeled, diced, steamed until tender, then pureed.  It came to exactly one cup of pumpkin puree, and I used that to make a batch of a dozen pumpkin muffins for breakfast (DH cooked venison tenderloin in sauteed onions to go with our muffins that day).  Six were 'plain' for DH, and six I added mini chocolate chips to for myself.  Of course I forgot to take a picture of them until after breakfast, which is why there's only seven muffins shown.

Here is my recipe, adapted long ago from a Betty Crocker zucchini muffin recipe and then reduced to yield only a dozen muffins rather than 24 since DH and I definitely do not need to eat two dozen muffins between us!  (I used to make 24 muffins when the kids were little and all still living at home.)

Pumpkin Muffins
1 cup pumpkin puree
3/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup veggie oil
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 12 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves

(You can also add 1/2 cup chopped nuts and/or 1/2 cup chocolate chips/mini chocolate chips if you have them on hand and your family likes them.)

Heat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease 12 muffin cups. 

Mix pumpkin, sugar, oil, vanilla and eggs in a large bowl.  Stir in the remaining ingredients until just moistened, you don't want to over stir or your muffins won't have those nice domed tops. 

Fill each muffin cup about 3/4 full.  Bake 20-25 minutes or until tops are light brown and spring back when touched lightly.

Cool 10 minutes in pan on wire rack, then remove muffins from pan and serve.