POTATO DIGGING BEGINS

 Up to greet all four grand kids this morning. Hubbie took g-son to school and the girls and I watched TV until hubbie got back home.  He still has to make an extra loop out the road to turn around instead of being able to turn back on the road we live on with all the traffic.    I got chores done and then he took IR and CA home to stay with Connie, their other g-ma, while RL and I had breakfast.                       When he got back he and RL went outside to work on making some hoops over my raised beds to hold the blankets and plastic off the vegetables . The weather folks are predicting our first frost this weekend. All my crops are cold hardy but they look so good I don't want to take a chance on them getting burned by frost, especially the lettuce bed.                                                                                       I got weekly laundry started and then went up to lend a hand but they already had it all done and were heading down to see if there was any ripe muscadine grapes.                                                                       As I continued with laundry RL came back in the house crying with a bee sting on her leg. Fortunately the yellow jacket stung her through her pants and by the time I got a baking soda / vinegar paste made she had stopped crying. Hubbie found the bee on his shirt and it was missing it's stinger so we made sure it wasn't in the sting and decided it must have pulled out in her pants and he shook it out when when he was making sure there were no more bees.                                                                                        Speaking of bees I took these pictures of this large bee hovering around outside the back door this afternoon. It looks a little like a yellow jacket but was much bigger and didn't seem aggressive at all. When I looked it up I discovered it isn't a bee at all but a "bee mimic" called a Flower Fly or Hover Fly that is a great polinator and totally harmless. My "what I learned new today" discovery !!!          

I put away my dried herbs between laundry loads this afternoon. I decided to wait until closer to the weekend frost to cut more herbs to dry and give them a few more days to grow.                                        After RL left hubbie and I got chores done and then dug some of our red potatoes we still have left. We decided next spring we only need to plant 5 lbs of the early red variety because we have only eaten about half of the 10 lbs we planted this year.  These won't keep long so we will need to come up with some inventive ways to cook them and maybe refreeze them after cooking.  We will finish the reds and start digging our Kennebacs tomorrow evening.                                                                                           Looks like a quick "yellow" and then brown for the leaves this year with all the moisture we have had.   There was another .25 inch in the gauge this morning from the overnight rain to bring the total from hurricane Delta to 3.4 inches for our area.   

We came inside and relaxed for the evening.                                                                                                Thankful for the blessings of this day.                                                                                                           God Bless and Good Night