I think October is my favorite month. It’s the month of my birth, was the month of my wedding, and it’s got some of the absolute best weather of the year. At the same time it seems like I’m always struggling this time of year; there’s always some transition, on top of the seasonal one. Some change, be it necessary or arbitrary or optional or mandatory, in a relationship or hobby or occupation. The constant buzzing awareness of the old world dying and the new one struggling to be born, etc.
That sense is particularly amped up at the moment. Tech as an industry is a fucking mess right now. C suite suits have dollar signs in their eyes as they experiment with staffing reductions, leaning hard on AI capabilities that have only recently emerged and which are changing software and the way we build it in ways that we will not understand the full ramifications of until later. Dozens of countries have recently appealed to their populations to ensure households have basic emergency supplies secured (which, to be clear, is a good and sensible thing to do – but for so many countries to be releasing messages about this right *now* in particular reflects both the number of unnerving things going on, at the intersection of both a swirling political mess and unprecedented shifts in global weather patterns.) In the US, everything is getting painfully expensive, and there’s an election coming up on Tuesday that I am getting text messages about roughly every hour. I am both looking forward to being done with the damn thing, and dreading the inevitable bullshit that will follow.
Still. Everything is easier to take when the air is crisp, the leaves are a dozen bright shades, and especially when there’s a fire burning in the woodstove.
I’ve done a terrible job of keeping up with the garden lately – it is in dire need of some cleanup – but I have tried to at least walk through once a day so I see how things are progressing. The raspberries I started a couple years ago (which sounds very purposeful, but really I just tossed some dumpster-dived berries that were moldy into a corner and ignored them) now fruit twice a year – the second round of which lasts into November. It’s fun and weird to still be picking ripe berries after Halloween.
My other fall berry is black nightshade – not quite sure which member of the species complex it is, probably S. americanum? (And before anyone freaks out, 1. I was trained as a botanist and know what I’m doing, 2. black nightshade complex species are non-toxic and easily distinguishable from deadly nightshade.) I didn’t actually eat any this year, but I like to leave them in the yard to do their thing because they pretty much just look after themselves. I might try getting seeds for a cultivated strain with larger berries, though.
In foraging news – I decided that I really wanted to take advantage of the fact that the black walnut trees in my area had a big mast year. They’re a huge pain to process but there is nothing quite like them, and I firmly believe that they make the best chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever had. I noticed that a local pedestrian path was littered with some particularly large nuts, and just due to foot traffic a bunch of them had basically been de-husked. I’m a sucker for a shortcut so I made a couple trips back and forth with buckets to collect them. I picked up a paint mixer attachment that I used with a corded drill to basically swirl buckets of the walnuts in water in their shells, to grind off as much of the husk as possible, which worked pretty well – especially considering my previous experience attempting to process them by hand.
They’re all curing in a big box in the dining room now.
Once the nuts have cured for a few weeks (so that the nutmeats shrink a little bit and pull away from the shell, and are hypothetically easier to get at…) I’m going to take a stab at shelling them with a hammer, pliers, and a pair of snips. I’m weirdly looking forward to this – there is something extremely visceral and fun and hunter/gatherer feeling about just sitting down to try to crack open a stash of nuts you gathered yourself, and that would make any squirrel jealous. They *are* sort of notoriously difficult to do a good job of cracking, because they are so very hard and the shell is shaped tightly to the nutmeat, but the tool that everyone swears by for cracking them is like $200. The batch I processed this year is at least 5x as large as any I’ve done before – see above re having only purchased the paint mixer for processing this year, and cleaning the shells by hand before – so it’s possible that I may end up saying screw it, and buying myself an extremely specific tool for the holidays. But, I’m too cheap to not try it the cheap way first.
Here’s looking forward to more crisp days and black walnut chocolate chip cookies, and whatever else brings joy to our fall days.
