Goodbye garden, hellow winter. Prepper expo.

The garden is dead, long live the garden!
We had a hard freeze warning, the first one of the season, so we decided to just let it happen. If you only have a few plants it's easy to protect them, but a larger garden requires a ton of work that might get you a week or two of growing. In our case it would have gotten 1 more week, more hard freezes coming this weekend. All of that covering, water placing, light bulb hanging, etc.... pass.

Part of me was sad to see it all dead and ugly looking, part of me was glad it's over. We picked everything that was big enough to be tasty and useful:

This was Friday evening, Rock doesn't like tomatoes. He's not a fruit and veggie kind of dog, Luke is the vegan hound, good thing he can't see all this stuff.

After making a decision to not save the garden, and then to pick it, all of this stuff needs to get used and not go to waste. I gave the lower right box to the neighbors, and the rest is ours. What to do with green tomatoes? Salsa!!!

It tasted spicy but we didn't have any chips, so we will buy some and try it out. I'm thinking the next batch will be one jalapeno pepper less. This recipe is: 15 green tomatoes (can use red too), 4 red peppers (no seeds), 4 jalapenos (with seeds), 2 sweet white onions, handful of cilantro, cumin, cayenne pepper, Italian type seasoning; simmer for 40 minutes, process in hot water bath for 20.

We got up early Saturday for a trip to Denver for a visit to the Self Reliance expo. This years expo was pretty big, all kinds of vendors and people. We met A. American and got some autographed copies of Going Home and Surviving Home, met Jeff the berkey guy and also met Jack Spirko from the Survival Podcast. I wanted to know what a Berkey seller would say about the black vs. ceramic filters and he said black (perfect, it's all we have anyhow). Jack was really nice, we listen to his podcasts all the time, and rarely does an episode go buy that we don't learn something. It's important for us to say thanks, and many times the volume of emails a person receives means it gets skipped over, in person is always better. The new books have already been passed to other preppers to read.
We picked up 2 of the berkey sport filtration water bottles and just had a good time in general checking out all of the cool, useless, or too expensive products.

Good times in Colorado. Hoping to get up in the hills for some fall foliage pictures this weekend. If I come across a road closed/park closed sign, it's going in the bushes.