Fall Equinox

It's officially fall, so we're getting the last gasp of hot summer weather. Still, it cools off at night, which is really pleasant. This is some of Chico's most perfect weather: hot enough at midday to make you seek shade, swimming, and cold beer, but cool and pleasant enough in the evening to encourage lingering outdoors past sunset. The sun sets noticibly earlier, and it's definitely time to start the rest of the fall crops. We put the chickens on a row where the beans had quit producing and let them do the work.

Meanwhile, I picked a bunch of San Marzanos, and tried oven drying them this time. This worked much better than our sun-drying technique. Turns out, you are supposed to take the tomatoes indoors at night! Lol... we don't HAVE an indoors at the farm. The oven method worked really well anyway. I did three racks worth.

After I dried them, I made sauce out of some of them. First I harvested more tomatoes from the backyard, and roasted them for a couple of hours. I mixed that with sauteed onions and garlic (from the farm), fresh oregano and basil (backyard), plus olive oil, salt, and pepper. Then I chopped the dried tomatoes and added them also, and cooked it down for a while. It was pretty thick! I froze it in one-tablespoon dollops for later pizzas.

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Weird Random Street Performance
I was downtown for lunch with Rick, and I saw these guys on the corner. Edward and Orion were doing their own little social experiment/performance art piece to see how people reacted to guys with cardboard signs. These are their second signs. Edward's first sign said "Don't read this sign." So I had to stop and apologize, because I'd already read it by the time I learned I wasn't supposed to read it. We got to talking, and generally had a wacky interaction there on the corner of 2nd and Broadway.