Just one melon, that’s all I got from the artemis melon vines I grew in one of the hoop houses. The vines were loaded with ripening melons this summer when one night, something got into the hoop house and destroyed them. It looked like a mini tornado had gone through the hoop house. Vines, leaves, and melons were ripped to shreds. One vine with one tiny, baby melon survived. I secured the hoop house so that nothing could get in, and after keeping it secure through October, I brought it in a week ago to ripen.

This morning it was time to see what we’d missed this summer, and was thrilled that all was not lost. This one juicy, delicious melon was worth all the effort. Next year I’ll make sure no critters get into the hoop house to destroy the artemis melons.

From beautiful flowers come beautiful beans. From beautiful beans come delicious, heart warming meals. I received this text from someone who purchased some of the white flower beans I grew this summer:

I just wanted to share this pic of our first pot of your white flower beans. We made crockpot baked beans and OMG, these are delish!!! Thanks for growing.

Thank you for buying them, and letting me know you enjoyed them. From beautiful flowers come happiness.

My husband and I were discussing how to describe the taste of the beans recently after eating bowls of them. They are different than other beans. He described them as tasting a bit like little potatoes, and they do.

After summer’s long draught, the fall rains have given birth to a mini spring. Nettles push up through the damp earth to soak in the morning mist. We’ll get to enjoy nettle soup before the frosts cut them down. The mosses are enjoying the wet too. They spring to life, drinking in the water and fluffing up. Funny isn’t it, that when you caress a soft moss, you’re touching mostly water.

Chickens enjoy the wet woods too. The damp earth digs up easily, revealing juicy earthworms and bugs to fill their crops.

One last flower clings to the stewartia. One last flower next to a crimson leaf. It’s spring next to fall.

The cool weather keeps the salad greens growing. The tub of greens I picked this morning went off to Tweets. The cabbage below I picked in the dark this evening for supper. It’s a wonder how plants grow out of the earth to become these delightful, edible feasts.

Where do vegetables come from? They come from the sky, and this is how. Before you can plant a carrot or lettuce seed, you need living soil. Living soil starts up in the sky where the tips of the trees catch the wind and the rain. After soaking in the sun and drinking the rain all summer, the leaves come fluttering down to earth, where they end up in my wheelbarrow.

Look at a wheelbarrow full of leaves and you’re looking at your future salad. Over the winter and into spring, bacteria and fungi and earthworms and a million other organisms will take this bounty that drifted out of the sky, and turn it into living soil which will grow your future salad.

Speaking of the sky, more than leaves live up there, so do the swans and snow geese. Working outdoors lets you hear and see the trumpeters when they fly overhead. At first you hear them honking. Half the time they go by behind the trees, out of view. It doesn’t matter. Even if you can’t see them, hearing them brings plenty of joy.

When the snow geese go by, you can’t miss them. They love to party. They fly by in the hundreds and thousands, all of them talking at the same time.

I picked the last bowl of tomatoes today. It was time to toss the tomato plants in the compost and save a few tomatoes for the kitchen. The rest of the tomatoes I gave to the chickens. Next to worms and bugs, chickens love sweet, juicy produce like melons and bananas and grapes. They enjoy juicy tomatoes too.

Two summers ago, these tomatoes were tree leaves high above the ground. Now they are inside a chicken, though not for long. They’ll get ground up, nutrients extracted, and the unused bits will soon pop out the chicken’s butt. Then it’s a sojourn into the soil before getting sucked up by tree roots and carried to the top of the trees to spend a summer in the sky again. Everything goes round and round and round.