I love fall!

Last night I made butternut squash soup and it made the whole house smell divinely of fall. I used two very large squash and double the recipe, leaving out the chili flakes.

This was after the boys and I went to the nursery and got a bunch of lovely Halloween-colored plants. We're not into Halloween so much, at least not like some people are, making their front lawns look like graveyards (ick). I much prefer to decorate for two months of "Harvest" time leading up to Thanksgiving. It's starting to feel a little bit like fall; maybe Sunday was the last day of 80-plus weather!

Here's some of our handiwork (this pic doesn't quite do it justice; those coreopsis [the daisy-type flowers are an incredible shade of orange)!

more seeds

A week ago I planted another bed of seedlings right next to the first one. This time there are beets, lettuce, more onions and three more pumpkin seedlings!

I love composting. Now, maybe you're thinking, "Um, isn't that just storing garbage in your yard?" No, I say, it is turning garbage into fertilizer! Throw some seeds and dirt into the fix and you've got food! How cool is that?

But it also allows to experiment with flat ware. Those ones that look like regular plastic but supposedly biodegrade. So I'm taking a "biodegradable" fork, knife and spoon, and regular plastic knife, and throw them into the compost pile. When I turn the pile again in three weeks, we'll see how they're doing.

We'll start with this knife I got today at the Oakland Zoo, because it has a cool web address on it: taterware.com:




Here's a spoon I got at the Monterey Bay Aquarium a couple weeks ago with my clam-chowder-in-a-bread-bowl (it says "Eco-products" on one side and "Made from Plants" on the other):



A fork, also from the Oakland Zoo cafe; it says "dispoz-o USA" on it, and the web site claims that company's products are biodegradable:



And here's the plain, plastic knife:



So my assumption is that the stuff that is supposed to biodegrade will compost in my pile, since I have successfully turned a bunch of other stuff (kitchen scraps, paper plates, egg cartons) into compost. Tune in three weeks from now to see if anything happens...

Seedling success

Observe my lovely seedling patch:



The tomato cages are actually for sunflowers; most of the seedlings in the center part of the bed are carrots.





These two big-leafed beauties are PUMPKIN seeds. Yes, very exciting. This is a dwarf variety called Baby Pam -- only about five pounds per fruit.