Where did summer go?

Has it really been four months since I posted?  Terrible!  What happened?

Oh yeah, life... :)

In August, we took a 12 day trip to Colorado and when we returned, I was back to work.  While Colorado was lovely, our return to Minnesota was bittersweet.  It was great to be home, but I was sad to have missed two weeks of time on the lake and in the gardens.  Summer is so short here, I decided then that I would NOT spend two weeks away again during our most beautiful time of the year.

So, having not blogged for awhile, here is how the season turned out:
1.  LOTS of potatoes and onions harvested (will definitely plant Candy onions again next year!)
2.  Not as many tomatoes as last year, but still enough to freeze about 20, 3 c. bags of spaghetti sauce.  I freeze 3 cups in a bag because my family seems to never use the last cup in a quart jar, and 3 c. is just right with no waste!
3.  LOTS of pickles this year.  I stopped canning at 24 quarts and started giving them away.  People started running away whenever I started to say anything about cucumbers.
4.  Few squash - our cold spring, dry August, and early frost pretty much made for a difficult year for everyone.  We yielded about a third of what we did last year and only froze 10 cups this year.
5.  Great flower show this year!  Wish I had taken more pictures.  Maybe next year (famous last words!).

So now we have had our first accumulating snowfall of the season, and we're settling in for a long, cold winter, northern Minnesota style.