Fermenting & brewing - perfect ... thinking about doing some of this (elderberries).
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The garden is gradually dying out so not much going on there. The main event are the flowers – 2 beds of zinnias blooming and the tithonia and sunflowers started blooming this week. There is a 3rd bed of zinnias where I've planted some commercial seeds & some are coming up. Those commercial seeds are for very large zinnias and I'm hoping to harvest seeds for next year.
My mom is looking at replacing a lot of her gardens which have become gourmet salad bars for the deer (hostas, sedum, day lilies, rose bushes) with plants that the deer won't eat. She bought four Echinachea plants a couple of weeks ago – really pretty & the deer are leaving them alone. It is expensive buying plants like the Echinacheas that are already blooming. I want to clean out a small shed to use for starting garden plants next spring and we could do flowers at the same time.
There was a long post this week by The Heirloom Gardener on elder berries that was not only informative, but also had several very old recipes, which were interesting. One of them involved pork & since I'm getting a half hog the end of September, that one was definitely saved. There are also recipes for wine, cordial & vinegar. I've been very interested in elderberries for medicinal purposes recently and did a little research to see about growing them – the deer love them, pretty much all parts, so that would be a major problem. It would definitely be easier & likely cheaper in the long run, to just buy a pound of organic berries to make elderberry syrup. Making syrup and maybe vinegar would be a good winter project and I have enough bottles left over from making vanilla that I could use to gift a couple of bottles of syrup, maybe for Christmas. Elderberry was the International Herb Association's “Herb of the Year” in 2013.
The Heirloom Gardener also posted a quote from Henry David Thoreau (artwork James Nairn)::
I like this quote a lot – even though we've had a brutal summer, there have been aspects to enjoy above & beyond the garden. Now that we're closing in on September, I'm more than ready to “live in Fall”!