Sweet September

So many things I have been wanting to blog about and just couldn't find the time, so, here I go...

As the summer wound down, there were a couple of things that had to be done. One day,

Tina, Molly & I took a walk down into the woods to gather jewelweed for the last time of the year. We clean it and process it to use in the jewelweed soap we call "Happy Wanderer" that people find so helpful in the spring after their first exposures to poison ivy.

It's kind of a pleasant way to pass a few hours, and we wound up with plenty of the frozen "goop"!

That same day, as we were walking around the yard preparing to venture down to the woods, we saw this fungus growing under the paper birch in the front yard.

If you know of the PA Dutch treat called shoofly pie, this mushroom reminded us of a "wet" shoofly pie. The edges certainly looked like pie crust and the top appeared to glisten with molasses. We decided not to taste it though!

Last Saturday was the last day for our market this year, but a couple of weeks ago, I left Tina alone at the tables so I could drop some mail off at the Post Office before it closed (I think I may have also continued on to Dunkin' Donuts to get us some coffee and Bagels). As I walked out of the P.O., this steeple reared up into the gray sky and it just cried out for a photo. Luckily, I had my camera along and took the shot. It is quite massive and very impressive although it really doesn't appear that way here.

I continued then around to the parking lot with my camera still in hand and saw something that has always been very interesting to me. Lancaster had a famous artist named Charles Demuth and for some reason, these silos remind me of his work. It often contains stylized depictions of just this type of thing.

The final event of the Month was the first wholesale show we have ever attended as vendors. Other years, we have been represented at shows, but we have never represented ourselves at one, so it was a pretty exciting event.

We were small potatoes compared to a lot of the vendors there. While we weren't sure exactly what to expect, we held our own just fine and picked up a few new customers.