Saying Goodbye to our Friends

Well, this is it. We finally got a thorough frost last night, killing anything we didn't bring inside or cover with blankets. Tomorrow morning we leave on our 2-week journey to Southern California. As a last post, I thought I'd say goodbye to some of our favorite garden friends we've made during the last four months:

The neighbor's dog Tess

Our Worker Bees

The Garden Orb Spider

Harvey

Chicken

The Woodchuck (he was too tricky to take a picture of OR shoot)

The Bears at the Rockland Lobster Festival

Kitchen Catch-up

Don't worry, we haven't been too busy in the garden--we've still had plenty of time to prepare good meals. In fact, a lot of the garden work we've been doing for the past couple weeks has been preserving what we harvest through canning, freezing, drying, storing, and eating. (Alright, eating isn't really preserving, but we do an awful lot of it anyway.)

A summertime berry-coconut smoothie:

Handmade pizza with a sourdough crust, prosciutto, homemade sauce, fresh tomatoes, olives, and swiss chard:

A pot pie with a handmade crust, locally produced beef, and lots of veggies from the garden:

This kale was washed and sold to Darby's, a restaurant in Belfast:

And we're still making plenty of bread:

A Night at the Blue Goose

Last night Jon and I were invited to our friends Dan and Heather's house for a potluck with a few of their friends. After a delicious dinner comprised of various produce from five different gardens we headed down Route One to the Blue Goose, a roadhouse dance hall in Northport. We went to see Johnny Hoy and the Bluefish, an amazing blues band that plays here annually to the biggest crowd of the year. (I've heard that the band is just as excited about this performance as the local audience is.)

Before the band got two notes out, the entire hall was dancing. Jon says it looked like the first few songs played at a wedding reception, when the adults are still drinking and all the kids run onto the dance floor, jumping and waving their arms. Except at the Blue Goose, there were about 150 people, aged 20-80, jumping and waving their arms. There was no drinking, no smoking, just dancing.

We danced from 9:30 t0 1:00 in the morning, when the band finally called it quits. It was an exhausting night but I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I felt like I got a taste of true Maine culture: a hall on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere filled with people of all different ages, styles of dress, and styles of dance. The only uniting factor was a love for the music that was being performed (that, and our uniformly white skin!).