Good Monday morning to everyone. As you can tell it has been a blah few days here. Nothing new from the gardens since the season is coming to an end. It is mainly cleaning up and getting everything ready for its winter sleep. I repotted my youngest lavender plants yesterday and brought them inside and transferred my basil cuttings to a pot. They are both on my top shelf by the patio door. The temperature was only 45 this morning which means I really do have to get off my butt and get take the cuttings from the stevia, large lavender and sage. Those all need a bit of help to take root so I will use the rooting hormone to assist them. I have shifted my gardening to later in the day when it warms up a bit. We are also getting our cool weather clothes together and more accessible. So far we haven't seen much color change here. Quite a few trees seem to have gone from green to dead brown (or bare) with not much in between. Some of them should have turned gold or red, or bronze. Not much evidence of that.

We have only about a month before the elections but I have little enthusiasm for it. I will vote but holding my nose all the way. I love the selective bias of the national media. We have had repeated stories on how much trouble the Democrats are in and how low their approval ratings are but almost everyone of those stories fails to mention that the Republican ratings are even lower. It looks to me like nobody "like(s) anybody very much." (Kingston Trio, Merry Minuet--for those who wonder why the quotes.) A couple of interesting Huffington Post articles concerning the campaigns caught my eye this morning. The first involves those candidates who have had financial troubles. It seems that voters are looking somewhat kindly at candidates' financial misfortunes this year and those candidates who hoped to capitalize on their opponents troubles by characterizing them as lacking in judgement or character may be making a serious mistake. I can understand the dilemma. This economy has shown that even the most prudent can find themselves in financial difficulty. There but for the grace of God----. The second story involves several vulnerable Democrats that have found themselves without party support because the National party considers them not worth the effort to save--triaged essentially. Some are declaring their independence of the party which leads to some interesting thoughts about what might happen even if the Democrats maintain a numerical majority in the House and Senate. We may have a Republican party with a significant number of Tea Party Republicans who won't go along with the Republican national agenda and a Democratic party with a significant number of independent 'Democrats' who have no allegiance to the Democratic national agenda. What kind of horse trading will that involve to get anything done?

'What's old is new again' as the last line of this article says. I am not surprised at the increasing number of people interested in food preservation. Two years ago the sales of seeds and gardening equipment increased up to 30%. Last night I saw the first news story about the increasing number of people raising their own chickens (and collecting the eggs) carried by any national news media. The people featured in these stories express two concerns to explain their venture into producing their own food--cost of commercially provided foods (increasing constantly) and quality (controlling what goes in and getting better flavor). Those were exactly the drivers pushing us into growing what we can in our little space, buying from local vendors who get their products locally, and freezing/drying for winter use. The increasing numbers of recalls haven't made for a very trusting atmosphere for large factory producers of foods.