Music Moves Me - Harvest Time

Welcome to the early harvest edition of Music Moves Me, a blog hop I participate in every Monday.  Some weeks, we have a theme.  Other weeks, we can blog about whatever music theme we want.  This is one of our "freebie" weeks, so:

Today, I celebrate the harvest coming in here in upstate New York.

I live in apple country, and thought, why not find some songs mentioning apples, or harvests, or even the harvest moon.

First up, is a song from my early teenaged years - Apple Peaches Pumpkin Pie by Jay and the Techniques, a singing group from Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Next, we are going to go into the past.  Way into the past.  Shine On Harvest Moon, here, was debuted in the 1908 Ziegfeld Follies.  This version is from the 1931 Ziegfeld Follies, as sung by Ruth Etting.  Writing this blog post allowed me to learn more about the Ziegfeld Follies.  I know there is some connection between the Follies and the city I work in, Binghamton, but I couldn't find much on it in the limited time I had to write this.

But the song goes even further back than that.  How about a version from 1909, as sung by Ada Jones and Bill Murray?

From 1972 - Dancing in the Moonlight, by King Harvest, a band that originated in Paris, France.  The song is still with us, being incorporated into the soundtrack of a current movie called "Hitman's Bodyguard".

Neil Young - Harvest Moon.  Doesn't this song make you want to dance in the light of the harvest moon with someone you love?

I will end with a 1962 song from Judy Collins which was an adaptation of a Yeats poem - Golden Apples of the Sun, here sung live in 1976. It begins "I went out to the hazelwood..." The imagery of the poem is amazing, especially if you read it approaching your senior years.

Come join this blog hop and do some dancing and apple eating.  Tomorrow, follow along while I make an apple cake for Wednesday evening.

Join this #MusicMovesMe blog hop every Monday - here are the people responsible for it:
X mas Dolly is the Conductor of this trip, and the other Conductors are her fellow bloggers Callie of JAmerican Spice, ♥Stacy of Stacy Uncorked♥  and Cathy from Curious as a Cathy.

Beautiful Basil

 It's the time we dread - saying goodbye to our gardens.

Yesterday, we finished preparing our community garden plots for the winter.  We probably won't get a killing frost until Thursday morning, but, per the rules of our garden, the last gardening day is October 27 (frost or not).  Some community gardens allow you to keep plants there all year round (for example, allowing you to grow perennials); ours doesn't.

Fences had to be taken down, sunflower stalks had to be stomped to the ground, and produce had to be picked.  Debris had to be put in dumpsters.

Today, its the turn of the small garden at our house. We have a garden in our front yard - mostly flowers but a couple of food plants (basil, a pepper.)

Our dahlias will need to be dug, but we will wait until after the killing frost.  We dug our glads up (more on that later in the week).

The focus today was on our basil.  We had both taken today off from our jobs for a trip that ended up not happening.  But instead, we lucked into what might be the warmest day of the rest of the year.

 In the front yard, we had our Italian basil.

In our back yard, Thai basil, which were volunteers from last year.  We've never had volunteer basil before and the several plants were a pleasant surprise.

I sat out in the back yard, in our 60 degree (and breezy) weather, stripping off the leaves. This was te view from my tiny porch.

The perfume of basil quickly filled the air, and, after I brought the leaves inside, the house.  (Where is that smell-o-blog plug in when you need it? )

Then, my spouse, the cook, took over.  While I wrote my blog post and took pictures, he got out the food processor, and blended the leaves with a little chicken stock, to a fine cut, not a puree.  This is an experiment - because of watching our weight, we didn't want to use oil.

Then, into the ice cube trays they went.

Spouse will use this for various purposes, including flavoring tomato sauce.  We don't do much with pesto, but I will wish I had fresh basil leaves for a nice tomato/fresh mozzarella salad.

I'll be dreaming of that salad until next summer.

How did you spend today? I hope it was a beautiful one for you, too.