Day 16: Completed 60 | Food | Jelly | Blackberry.

Day 17: Continued 114 | Needlework | Cross-Stitch | Wall Hanging; Continued 161 | Craft | Holiday Decorations | Fall.

Monday, three of the four classes from Anya’s school took a trip to a local farm to harvest potatoes. The school kids planted the potatoes last spring, and the harvested tubers will be sent to the local public schools for lunches. Anya’s teacher brought back a bucket of taters for the class, and today they washed, cut, and cooked them. Since Anya only goes half days, she wasn’t going to be there for the class potato snack. Her teacher let Anya pick one out to take home, and we’ll cook it up with dinner tonight. Last fall when we did the harvest, we were joined by three buses of public school kids. This time it was just us until maybe halfway through, when one bus of kids showed up. The day was cloudy and misty, and the ground was very wet. We saw all sorts of creatures: a little snake, a mouse, a tomato horn worm cocoon, and a honking bunch of earthworms.

I made a batch of blackberry jelly Sunday night. It tastes a lot like the raspberry jam. Last night I worked a little bit on the Halloween garland, and I started to wonder if this is really a “fall” decoration. There is a miscellaneous holiday decoration where Halloween would definitely fall, but Halloween is in fall, and there are no Spring or Summer or Winter classes. I’m gonna go with it. Last night I also went back to the cross-stitching. No matter how carefully I think I count, I keep finding little mistakes. Some I fix, some I let go. I’ll just add a couple extra squares of yellow here, move the green over there. Perhaps in the end it will still look sort of like what it is supposed to look like. I still want to make apple jelly and can apples before I put away the canning stuff, but my canning energy is mostly boiled away. Andy is making a cider press.

My feet stink.