It is feeling like fall around here.  It was starting to feel like that at the end of July with cool misty mornings and lots of spiders and their webs.  But now even more so.  I was picking blackberries and really admiring these flowers.  I haven’t appreciated them before.

I am thinking that the garden is looking good.  It’s not producing as much as I would like, but it is pretty in a way.

The clothes line tomatoes are starting to produce too.

The birds are enjoying plum pieces.

There is a pretty rose in front of our house.

The cow herd is looking good too.  The trees’ leaves are starting to change.

And leaves are starting to fall.

The turkeys like the apple bits too.

The goats even look good on the grass.

Our goose couple like their morning bathes.

Our old wether Bambam moved into the back half of the barn.  We will see if he likes it.  The other sheep that were with him on the pasture aren’t very nice to him.  Now he is with our disabled ewe Vanessa and our two goats.  We shall see if this combination works out better for him.

I thought the back of our house looked good in the sunshine with some flowers blooming on the porch rail.

After finally recovering from my bee stings, I found this site that describes Yellow Jackets.  I learned that what I have been calling Yellow Jackets in our greenhouse and other structures are actually paper wasps.

I know about bald faced hornets as I have been stung by them a couple of times.  But didn’t realize this is what their nests look like.

And I didn’t realize that Yellow Jackets are ground nesting.  The nests are actually leftover from the previous year but only become obvious to us when the bees become more active in the heat of the late summer.  So it was definitely Yellow Jackets that stung the heck out of me recently.

Our fig tree is actually starting to grow.  Every year I think it is going to die, but it doesn’t.  So now I have some hope.  And I have a fig newton recipe ready for the day when we finally get figs.

And this morning there were two coyotes running together on our back fence line.  This is new for us on our camera to see two at once.

Finally, I finished this book as an audiobook on Everand.  It was fascinating to me.  It is the story of a man who decided in 2012 to start sleeping in old slave residences.  He started out in his home state of South Carolina but ended up in other states too, including northern ones.  He learned a lot about the history of these places and the ancestors who stayed there.  And he was able to teach about these topics too. He is trying to encourage the preservation of these historic sites.  He interacts with descendants of slaveowners too, some of which still own the properties, encouraging them to preserve them, provide education about the influence of the slaves on the history of these properties, and help with identifying the previous occupants of the dwellings.  I know I have ancestors that were slaveowners and even was able to see the outside of the kitchen outbuilding where one slave lived.  I also came across records related to slaves that my ancestors had including a sale of a young “mulatto” child that was born on one of the properties.  I have been reluctant to pursue this history because I am scared it will lead me to conclude that my ancestor raped the child’s slave mother and sold the child, separating him from his mother at a young age.  But now I have the courage to read these records and confront the truth.  I may have African-American cousins that are the descendants of this evil.  It is hard to stomach this as well as the white privilege that I may have due to the kidnapping and enslavement of innocent people producing wealth for my ancestors.  But confront it I will try to do.