Lot's of leaf loss here and out of bloom for a while now. I hate it that it won't rebloom until next year at this time. I think it's a lck of sunlight around my parts that causes the leaf loss..Oh well:-( Purple, I never heard of a town called Opp..Cool name! I thought that was the abbreviation for youur town.lol It sounds like a place where you can hear a swarm of bees from a mile away and the sounds of a hummin birds feathers flap as it drinks from your food source! What I would do without noise pollution and the every day cars backed up on the roads. To hear the frog peepers make their music on a first warm spring night. We use to until development took over. I once stayed at my sisters house which is a mile into the woods in the country. It was so dead silent there to sleep, that I could here buzzing noise in my ear all night. I never slept thatn night! A place where you can plant an Osmanthus in the ground and enjoy it's size for years to come! Mike

Moni, I love the aroma of pineapple sage. I bet your house smells delicious! i noticed yesterday that we still had lots of different herbs still growing and I hate it that tonight's cold temperatures will kill the ones, like basil, that aren't winter-hardy. I spent most of yesterday harvesting what was left of the garden, which had rebounded nicely from the summer drought conditions with above-average (finally!) rain falling here in October. We still are in drought, but everything had greened up so much that it didn't really look like we still have drought conditions, at least until you noticed the cracks still in the ground beneath the green plants. I spent most of my time harvesting hot and sweet peppers....roughly 15 gallons of them, so I will spend the day, and likely the rest of the week, in the kitchen processing peppers. Many will be blanched and frozen for use in cooking all winter long, but I have a lot of poblano peppers that I'm going to cut up and put in the dehydrator. I'll also be making a lot of pepper jelly, but today I may just wash and chop up the peppers for pepper jelly, and then freeze them and make the jelly on another day. I thought my canning season had ended back in late July or early August, but apparently it hadn't. It might take all day just to get that much of the prep work done, and I think I'll have to buy pectin before I can make jelly because I have only a few packages of it stashed in the pantry. I also harvested dozens of winter squash, but they don't have to be processed quickly like the peppers, so I left them in Rubbermaid storage bins out in the garage. We moved about 35 or 40 molasses feed tubs filled with plants to the greenhouse, and that included some tomato plants with quite a few tomatoes on them. I ran out of time and daylight yesterday before I had harvested any herbs or cut any flowers for bouquets, but will have a chance, I hope, to do that today since we shouldn't have freezing temperatures here until sometime tonight. We had an onslaught of honey bees and ladybugs congregating near the doors to any and every building yesterday afternoon, looking for a warm place to shelter from the cold. We always have ladybugs swarming near the doors right before the first hard freeze, but this is the first time the honeybees have congregated around the back door to the house that way. Every time I came into the house, I had to sort of swat them away from the door because the bees were trying to come inside the house with me. The bees and lady bugs made it into the greenhouse, garage and sunroom, and I hope those places keep them warm during this little cold spell. Some ladybugs may have made it into the house, but if they did, I'll vacuum them up with the hand vac today and release them into the greenhouse. I hate seeing the growing season come to an end when everything was looking so good, but it happens every year, and it is nice to have a bit of a break from all the yard work for a few months. Dawn

No problem, Ci_lantro! When I typed the recipe, there were spaces between items. g-web doesn't like the way I do my recipes, I guess. Sometimes they don't even like spaces between lines when I post a comment. The flavor is great. Even without it being made with my grandmother's home made applesauce, it still is one of the recipes that tastes like I remember it as a kid. Grandma had a small orchard that had mostly Jonathon and McIntosh apples in it. She always left the peel on the apples when she cooked them for sauce, and it was always PINK applesauce. She never canned it, just froze it. To this day, I don't like most store bought applesauce. It just doesn't taste right. And if I find one I do like, the next time I buy it, it doesn't taste the same. Tami

Thank you all! I hope you enjoy your peaches and garden goodies. I had some extra cut up peaches that wouldn't fit into the baking dishes, so I let them 'juice up' as my grandmother used to say, and after supper (and grass mowing because it didn't rain again today!) I made 3 pints of chunky peach butter. I love to hear that popping sound when the jars seal.