The Weekend

This is what my dog does to my sister's yard when she watches her for us. I knew she dug up a spot to sit in the cool dirt, but I had no idea it was more than two feet deep. Oops. Thank goodness our yard is full of clay and far more difficult to dig in than my sister's sandy northern Michigan dirt.

We were back up at camp this past weekend for the Fall Retreat. So that's what I'll be talking about most of the week and I have some nice photos coming up for you. That and more canning. I got a bunch more fruit when I was up north because the region my sister lives in is covered with orchards full of almost any kind of fruit you could want: apples, pears, cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots, and plums. In fact, Michigan is second only to the much larger state of California in the variety of its agriculture.

Also, my dear brother-in-law is growing three varieties of grape so that he can eventually make his own estate wine. (He is also currently building his own skid steer [that's a little bulldozer like a Bobcat] and putting in the stone floor of the hobbit hole he built in his backyard. Talk about a Renaissance Man.) He told me I could take as many as I wanted, so I went out in the pouring rain this morning and took a bag full of grapes. Since I've already made two batches of grape jelly, I'll be scouring canning recipes to see if there's something else I can do with them.