Indian Summer and Cascade Rafters

It is Indian Summer here, my favorite time of year. The days are warm, but not hot, and the evenings are cooling off. The garden is coming to an end, although I will have an overabundance of tomatoes and raspberries for at least another month. I don't remember how many tomato plants this is, maybe 3,

I tied up the tomatoes and the raspberries the best I could now that they are huge, I will do better next year,

I do not understand what the blueberry is doing. It is huge and has tall ends that look like seed or flower pods, nothing like it did when it bloomed last spring,

Here is one day's harvest last week, including a tomato mutant,

Hey, did I harvest some honey? No, my neighbor's friend has bees and more honey than they know what to do with, so Sarah brought me some. It is raw, but not still in the comb. I remember eating honey still in the comb on toast in Michigan. It is still one of the best things I ever tasted.

Here is Cruiser banished to outside, so Spit can finish her dinner in peace,

Saturday morning I decided to take that trip to McCall and get away from the smoke. It was hazy there and way too crowded for me, so I left and stopped along the Payette River on my way home instead. Cascade Raft and Kayak was just upstream and the river was full of rafts and kayaks for the holiday weekend.

The rafting and the kayaking looked fun, but sitting on a beach in the shade with a cool breeze waving at people as they floated by was as better.

In the end, it was a beautiful, perfect weather weekend in Boise. The geese are back to honking as they fly overhead. It was cool enough today to resume my walking and the cemetery is full of geese again, waiting for me to tell them how much I missed them.

In So Cal, Indian Summer can go into November with some trips back to summer in between, but not here. We are predicting a short autumn, because of the long, hot summer, and some think there will not be much autumn color because the summer was so dry. Even I know from experience that winter comes overnight at the beginning of November. So that leaves a few more weeks of summer, but it is hard not to think about spending some of it preparing for winter.