It is so very much appreciated that Saturday is our day of rest and leisure. The other days of the week all have their assigned habitual places in the order of our lives. But Saturday? free and open to do with as we will. And we will so often use that freedom to actively seek out more work. There is always something that needs to be done around the house. Either within or without.

Just as well we have two very eager-to-help little dogs always at the ready to give a paw. After a long and leisurely (see, it's Saturday!) breakfast, Irving went out to the backyard to resume his cleaning-up operation to free up some room for the eventual fence-replacement scheduled some time or other when the contractor can squeeze us in to his busy schedule.

 

One of the composters behind the garden sheds was emptied, its contents of long-standing distributed over beds and borders in the backyard, the composter itself knocked down for flat storage. Now it was the turn of the second composter, the square one. Our kitchen compost pail gets emptied on average every three days. Its contents of melon husks, corn cobs, egg shells, orange peels, coffee grounds, tea bags, apple cores, peach pits, cherry stones, banana skins, and so much more pile up fairly quickly. 

It's been decades that Irving would empty one bin and leave the other to mature and break down to green gold to be shovelled out every fall onto the garden soil, enriching it for the coming summer. But with the advent of municipal compost greenbin pick-ups we've added fish and meat waste as well to the vegetable waste. And our backyard composters have been neglected for  years, as a result. Ensuring that whatever was in them was really well aged. I'd shovelled several wheelbarrows-full of the compost out of the bins last spring, but there was plenty left to continue composting.

 

We've had melons seeding themselves in garden in the past, ending up summer with ripe, mature melons we hadn't planted, but had planted themselves in the compost. And any number of tomato plants, volunteers from the compost bin. The tomatoes have always been cherry tomatoes. The mystery is I don't ever recall composting tomatoes; we eat them all, there's no 'waste' from them.

When Irving was finished, although not quite finished, we set off on a beautiful cool, sunny August day with Jackie and Jillie for a ravine hike through the forest trails. The elderberry trees are crying out for their elderberries, ripe and beautifully red, to be picked. The few apples on the wild apple trees this year chose to grow at heights we cannot reach. But there's still options for blackberries and thimbleberries.

 

When we returned after our hike, it was my turn to stay outside and do some garden work. Tidying up, for the most part. the ornamental crab apple trees are shedding their tiny fruit, along with leaves, and that needed sweeping up. The hosta flower wands asked to be cut back. There is always something to be trimmed and tidied, and another two large compost bags were filled between the backyard gardens and the front of the house.

 

 

That, in actual fact, is the way we tend to spend our Saturdays during the summer months, especially in the fall, when it's time to cut back perennials in preparation for the final clean-up in October. The garden is still colourful, but it is so obviously nearing exhaustion from its hard work over so many months of giving us pleasure. When's the last time you hugged your garden?