Leaves, leaves and more leaves

So another lesson learned - this one is regarding falling leaves.

I remember hearing motors when the first leaf fell from the trees. I also thought the motors were a bit over done and I love to see colorful falling leaves. The view is beautiful but when the rain came and not only a few drops of rain but in central New York,  rain comes in torrential rain for a week off and on. Plus before the snow comes, friends wanted to visit and of course we had a beautiful time - being a tourist at home and showing places to our friends and also finding new places to visit. It was beautiful! Rather think of why my neighbors are doing something different, I should just follow along.

When reality hit, I had lots of wet and dry leaves to remove from our lawn. I thought no problems, we have the riding lawn mower with the attachment on the back to dump in the compost pile - HA! One sweep and the dry leaves filled our attachment for collecting mowed leaves, then the 'tube' got clogged constantly, always wearing hearing equipment. Please, always wear safety equipment, especially hearing plugs and/or muffs. My husband has hearing loss from using machinery in his shop, so he figures since he is a bit deaf on machinery frequency that he will not use hearing protection.... another blog. He is a Wonderful Person, my soul mate.

So back to the leaves, I just decided to rake the leaves in various piles and then haul the leaves in the back to compost later. I use an old king size sheet to rake the leaves in and tie as a bundle for easy carting to the compost pile. Needless to say I got a great workout for my arms. My husband wanted to help so he got the riding lawn mower and was riding through my piles to pick up the leaves, um, could you not do that, since the piles were already in piles. Then he went to the work shop and devised the lawn mower with the tube going back to the small trailer. We tried the new contraption,and got leaves everywhere, we then clipped a bed sheet, with binder clips from our paper clip drawer to the back of the trailer to contain the leaves. However, since the leaves were in piles, we decided to haul the leaves 'the old fashion way' with rakes and cart the leaves to the compost pile. That was last week and I am still carting the leaves 'the old fashion way' to the compost pile. Of course there are a few leaves on the ground where I will use the mower without any attachments to 'fertilize' the ground with mulch leaves. The layer of mulched leaves should not be very thick.

While raking I always give thanks to the day of warm weather and seeing the beautiful colors in the leaves. We did get a snow fence that needs to be installed because drifting is a usual occurrence a neighbor told me

I interrupted my leaf raking to pick quince from our tree. I have made quince jam that came out relatively fine that I found on the internet with star anise. Since quince has lots of pectin to thicken the jam, none needs to be added. I tried and quince and apple pie, but it was too tart for my taste. The quince just in its fruit form sitting on my counter in the kitchen has a sweet smell, but if you bite into the quince, think of extreme tartness. A very unique fruit, smell of apple and pear but very tart. My favorite has been poached quince - 4 cups water, 2 cups sugar, cinnamon stick, vanilla bean and mulling spice. Cook until sugar is dissolved, place peeled and cored 4 quince until quince turns red/pink about one hour. A fork should pierce the fruit easily. Delicious - store in container in the refrigerator for up to one week. Quince are able to be stored in freezer for later use - peeled and cored I read for up to one year.