Bedding Down & Tidying Up

 ProfessorRoush accomplished several main fall chores last weekend and during the week. Last Sunday was a windy, but pleasant and sunny day which I took full advantage of in a fit of tidiness.  Of highest importance, I covered the strawberries with a nice thick bed of straw to protect those tender buds from any further frosts and freezes.   Last winter I neglected it as the bed was in poor condition anyway, but this year, with 50 new plants out, I thought a nice golden blanket was in order for the patch.  It looks so nice and cozy and protected now, don't you think?

I also bustled around the yard and ran the mower over some late invasive cool season grass and mulched up a few leaves in the process.   I do like a lawn with a nice even trim, don't you?   I also realized there were a couple of hoses that needed draining, the purple martin houses needed to be cleaned out and brought indoors, and my pack rat-bait stations near the house were empty.  All the usual and none too soon as, sometime between the strident warnings about new COVID variants and the apocalypse, the frantic media voices tell me that winter is coming.   Sure, except for the 70ºF temperatures predicted this week.   Those strawberry plants must think I'm nuts and just cut off their sunlight.

Also completed was the annual "over the rivers and through the woods" to our Indiana past trek of Thanksgiving, in our case the "over-the-river" being the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and the "through-the-woods" was of the forested Illinois and Indiana I-70 corridor.   A few days gone in a cloudy and colder Indiana landscape where it actually even rained one day, and Mrs. ProfessorRoush and I were never so glad as to come back Friday into this gorgeous sunset, occurring just as we made those last few miles through the Flint Hills to home.  Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home....err Kansas.