A Garden Raising is when friends and neighbors come to help someone put in a new garden. We were planning on having our garden raising tomorrow but hurricane Jose is making his way up the coast and will make tomorrow a very rainy day. We postponed it to Sunday, October 1. Everyone is welcome. I’ve posted a picture of the garden plan. During the day we will be creating the beds that circle the herb garden.
This means laying out cardboard and covering the cardboard with compost and leaf mulch so that the beds will be ready to plant in the spring. We will also be creating the paths between the beds, the brown area, by laying down wood chips. The fruit trees are already here but come spring we’ll plant nut trees, berry bushes and inoculate logs with mushroom spores. Evelyn, Llani and Ashley from Broadfork will be there to instruct and help.
It is hickory nut season. There are several hickory nut trees here. When they are ripe, the nuts with their green casings drop from the trees. I hear the constant plop, plop…plop from my office chair. When I go out to pick up the nuts, the squirrels start bad-mouthing me to each other angrily. Yet, 99% of the crop is taken by them before I even get there.
I’ve yet to find a way to crack these nuts without mushing the tasty interior into the shell fragments. I’ve done a bit of research and found a nut cracker that has the reputation of being able to handle this job. I bought this off ebay. It is a C.E Potter nutcracker. We’ll see!
Hickory nuts are part of our first harvest season. We’ve also harvested the Cornelian Cherries off of one of our Cornelian Dogwoods. The other tree is just coming ripe now. They are quite sour but turn sweet just as the fall off the tree. 
Most of the berries we harvested were gathered from off the ground. I boiled them up with some sugar and wine. Zoe then added some pectin and voila! There is jam! Neither of us had ever canned anything before so Zoe researched online and had several conversations with our friend Josette, master canner. Zoe ended up with 7 bottles of our own Cornelian Cherry Jam.