Fall Salad Plate: cucumbers, dill, carrots, tomatoes and lettuce from our garden, with some Saltspring goat cheese and fresh bread thrown in for good measure.

Third week of September and life is speeding by at a frenetic pace. I have lots of contract work right now, which is a great thing as it means income and opportunities to work with some of my favorite free-lancer friends. All week I’ve been either staring at a computer screen or staring through a windshield, driving to meetings or driving kids to track.

My Friday morning wake-up call came to me from Pat, a fellow garden blogger. Her awesome post about  “Slow Gardening & Slow Living” is a reminder to slow down and be present in the garden and in life. Rather than give you a condensed version of her post to skim over, I request that you take a deep relaxing breath, click the link above and take a few minutes to read her elegant post in it’s entirety. Because of her, I decided to spend some time thinking about my garden instead of rushing into my next report.

Okay for more slowing down and for some inspiration this weekend, read my post about Winter Gardening 101 published by BCLiving.ca. Two weeks ago Farmer Cole came over and planted spinach and lettuce seeds, which are now starting to appear. I noticed that with the drop in temperature, seeds are taking a little longer to germinate, but should soon be large enough to make it through the winter.

Although most of my plants are slowing down, Swiss Chard and kale are still growing at a pretty fast rate, but are also getting kind of “buggy”. Last weekend I did a lot of kale grooming and removed many of the lower leaves from the plants to make space, removed any leafless stems (this happens when kids harvest kale leaves and leave the stems behind) and also removed all yellowing leaves. So far, the plants haven’t suffered the usual fall “aphidpalooza” and I hope that there are still many more meals ahead.

The big activity for this weekend is going to be “raspberry control”. The old canes are dying off, so I need to remove them and tie up the new ones so that they don’t collapse if it snows. I also need to remove the soaker hoses and do a lot of weeding because I notice that ivy and morning glory plants are sneaking in under the hedges from my neighbor’s yard.

Okay, another deep breath and then I need to speed up and move forward to my 11:30 deadline – a final draft to my editor, J-Dub.

Have a beautiful fall weekend everyone!