Spoosy's Garden

We are having an apple kind of day today. For breakfast we enjoyed rolled oats topped with the last of 2011's apple butter, and today I'm making a 2012 batch while preparing for friends to come over tonight to can apple sauce. It seems like the right time to pick up where we left off and post about Spoosy Moose's fruits and vegetables at her summer cabin.

It's been two weeks now since we returned home from our two week RV trip. The kids are back in school, twelve loads of laundry have brought us back to a state of *normal*, and I'm slowly chipping away at getting the house organized since our move in May.

But I want to step back a few and wrap up the last four days of our summer vacation, spent at Spoosy's homestead way up north. It all just seems like a dream at this point.

Here is a shot I snapped from the cabin porch looking at the big kid stringing his line before going out to catch his mama a salmon in the river. (Little Miss daydreams on a swing, beneath a walnut tree.)

Mr. Noodle dons some Davy Crockett attire before heading out into the orchard.

Fallen walnuts rest on top of the kitchen's half door.

Center stage in the bear-proof orchard of mixed summer fruit is a fallen apple tree that still puts out a hug production.

Spoosy told us to help ourselves to all the (organic) fruit we wanted and so we loaded up a box for home. Then we all chipped in and helped her clean the orchard of fallen fruit that could not be used.

The raspberry patch in the upper garden where more vegetables used to be grown for the endless friends and family that visited the homestead through the decades.

I LOVED this feature of the lower garden. The large space was fenced, and around it a wide path was maintained by cutting back the endless blackberry bushes and creating a sort of *wall o' berries* that make harvesting easy and painless!

For as long as I have been hearing about Spoosy's cabin, I have been making pies that never quite live up to DH's memories of hers. This summer I finally got to enjoy the legend first hand - and it did not disappoint!