It’s my favorite time of year.

Everything about the fall gets me in a good mood: the leaves on the trees changing color, the cool sweatshirt weather and the golden fields of corn and soybeans being harvested.

It seems the fall took its time to show up this year. Over the past few weeks we’ve still had daytime temperatures in the mid-80s - not so typical for October in Minnesota. Even this week the forecast calls for some temperatures over 80 degrees.

But now I can feel the chill every morning when I walk my dog. The air is clear and crisp. The mosquitoes are almost gone. Now when I do some metal-detecting I can go into the woods without being eaten alive by those pesky bugs.

This time of year also brings back memories of my younger years. It’s the time when school had just started and I was running cross-country through the piles of fallen leaves along the course.

I have earlier memories of watching the Charlie Brown Great Pumpkin cartoon along with my brothers and sisters as it got closer to Halloween. Then it was the Wizard of Oz around Thanksgiving.

The fall is also the end of the regular baseball season and the beginning of playoffs. It doesn’t hurt to have my favorite team, the Mets, still in the hunt. (That’s as of Tuesday when I wrote this column).

But the fall also means getting prepared for the really cold weather ahead. It about time to start pulling all the bare tomato, pepper and cucumber plants in the garden. The few remaining blossoms won’t have time to mature before the daily frost ends their growing season. We’ll leave the butternut squash a little longer.

This weekend I have to drain all the hoses to the garden and roll them up before they’re filled with ice. Over the next few weeks we’ll keep watering the apple and plum trees to keep them healthy. I still have to make sure the heat lamps in the chicken house are working. (Yes, they’re spoiled!)     

Then it’s time to start bagging leaves to put around the foundation of the old farmhouse, put up the storm windows on the porch and move any garden tools into the shed. I’ve already started to re-arrange the lawnmowers,  tiller and utility cart in the garage to make room for my car before the first snowfall.

It might seem like a lot of work, but it’s something I look forward to doing every fall.

And I’ll do it again next year, too.