HOWLE’S HINTS: September

BY JOHN HOWLE

September is a great time of year to adopt the pace of nature through patience. The hay is in the barn, produce is in the freezer and canned jars, and it’s time to slow down and enjoy the fruits of your labor. One of the best ways to do this is observing the sunset during the late September afternoons. Whether you are on a high ridge, a sandy beach, in a bass boat, or on your back porch, watching a sunset gives us a chance to reflect and be thankful for what we have.

Recently, I was at beautiful Lake Wedowee and took a photo of a sunset dipping below the tree line. At the end of the day, I counted close to 20 boats that gathered in the center of the backwater of the Tallapoosa River to turn their engines and music off to reflect in silent reverence as the sun went down. It was remarkable how silent things went when the sun began to dip. Once nightfall began to emerge, the engines came to life with the boat sound systems and loud chatter of family and friends chatting on pontoon and bass boats. Watching the sunset is truly a restful experience and a great way to unwind at the end of the day.

Sunset scene at Lake Wedowee. Great way to reflect and unplug.

Remove and wash pumpkin seeds from your autumn pumpkins. Sprinkle them with salt and toast for a great trail mix food.

Preserve the Pumpkins

Sept. 22 marks the first day of autumn, and with that begins the popularity of the pumpkin during this season. People will begin serving pumpkin pies, and coffee shops will begin offering the pumpkin spiced lattes. I’ve heard that a pumpkin spiced latte tastes great, but I just can’t bring myself to order one. If it’s coffee, I want it black, and I picture the latte being served with a foamy layer of calf slobber on top formed into a heart-shaped swirl. Sounds a bit too dainty for me.

Pumpkins were some of the first crops grown in North America and their thick outer walls made for ideal storage in cold weather. Even today, a decorative pumpkin will last for weeks on a porch before it is discarded after Halloween. My favorite part of the pumpkin is the seeds. Once the pumpkins are ready to be thrown away or fed to the hogs, scoop out the seeds and wash the orange slime off them in a clean bucket. Sprinkle a bit of salt on the seeds and toast them, and you have a delicious and healthy snack that can be stored in freezer bags for a few fresh days of nutritious trail mix food.

Freezer Fun

When you have an excess of food, the easiest way to preserve for long-term is freezing. The grates in the freezer racks can cause indentions in the freezer bags, especially if you are freezing products with lots of juices such as soups and vegetables. An easy way to prevent the grate indentions in your freezer bags is to lay the bags of food on a baking sheet in the freezer while the product is freezing. Once the freezer bags of food have hardened because of freezing, you can then remove them from the baking sheet and stack them neatly on top of each other.

Freeze your bags on a baking sheet, and once the bags are frozen hard, remove the sheet and stack the bags on top of each other.

Don’t Fall in this Fall

Autumn signals the beginning of deer season. Doing some preseason or early season scouting will help you locate acorn-rich food sources, water sources, and natural feeding and bedding areas of deer. While you are scouting in unfamiliar areas, be on the lookout for abandoned wells from old home places and other hazards. Often, when an old home place became abandoned, folks might cover the old well with planks. Over time, these planks rot and the old hand-dug wells can be concealed by briars and thick growth. One misstep can result in a long trip to the bottom of a well.

I discovered one of these old wells near our property and the old planks were long since rotted out. Fortunately, I saw parts of the open hole through the grasses and avoided the danger. Another such hazard was found on the property of a friend of mine. This one was an abandoned gold mine. We wrapped rope and flagging all around the open hole, and we belly crawled to the edge of the gold mine. It was large enough to drop a full size ATV into it, and when we dropped a rock in, we counted 1, 2, 3, 4, SPLASH!

This abandoned gold mine serves as a hazard when scouting for deer. Patrick Casey is shown in the photo, and we put a rope around this one and marked with plenty of flagging after taking the photo.

Share the Hunt

The best part about fall hunting is the relationships you make – not the game you take. Use this fall to get youth involved in the outdoors and get them to unplug from all the digital media that they are continually bombarded with. Hearing the birds in nature, watching the sunset, and sharing conversations about life can be much more rewarding than time spent on social media, and the relationships you build are the real ones – not cyber or false Facebook relationships.

This September let’s remember the victims of 9/11, but let’s also be thankful for the blessings we have in this country, because we are still one nation under God, and God ordained that this nation would continue to exist under his protective hand.

Use this September to get youth involved in the outdoors and unplug from the social media for a while.