It has been a difficult few weeks to be a gardener in my area. The sun is setting early (and soon to be much earlier) so there’s no time for gardening after work and the weekends have been rainy. I appreciate this late season rain, as I believe that it is best for plants to go into dormancy well hydrated, but it would be much more convenient if it could just rain during the week instead of on the weekends.That pattern may change this weekend, thankfully, but it’s also going to be in the 40s. Remember how I said that the problem with cleaning up the garden is that it’s either the right time for the plants or the right time for the gardener and those two things rarely happen simultaneously? Well, that’s what’s happening now.
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| Box o’ bulbs waiting for planting. More coming tomorrow too! |
Well there’s nothing to be done about it. It all has to get done. The priority this weekend will be bulb planting, and a lot of it. Once that’s finished I can better clean out beds and then start mulching with shredded leaves (of which there are thousands on our lawn). After that, the containers need to be cleaned out. Most of the plants are mostly still alive (and would be more so if I hadn’t pretty much given up on watering) as we’ve not had a frost yet, but they’ve served their purpose. The new containers I planted for fall will stay, but everything else will begin its road to compost.
So that’s what is occupying my time this weekend. Here are some of the things that I enjoyed online recently:
Linda, whose garden shines no matter the time of year, is celebrating flaxen hues.
I do tend to go on about Chicago’s Lurie Garden, but check it out in fall! It’s gorgeous.
This is not a link, but can I just say I wish I would stop seeing posts about holiday shopping? Enough! Unless its a DIY project that takes time, it is WAY too early to be discussing such things. We still have Halloween and poor, forgotten Thanksgiving!
Sadly, many salvias are not hardy in my area, but they are beautiful enough to give some of them a shot and hope for the best.
Did you know you can buy kit houses on Amazon? I sure didn’t until I read this article on GardenFork.
Are you planning to be in the garden this weekend?
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We are expecting a freeze any night now here in Sachse, which is a suburb of Dallas, TX. My husband picked all the tomatoes, most of which are green. We did not pull them up in July after the first round b/c we knew we might get more after the temps dropped below 90 degrees again. He brought in 3 gallons of tomatoes and 3 gallons of bell peppers.
Our maple tree is quite showy right now as it is the best fall color we have thus far. The Chinese Pistache is still green. Black foot daisies, strawberry field gromphena, a few black-eyed-susans, and others still color our view.
Going to a friend's torake up pine needles to use on paths next season. Have not cut back much of anything. Still lots of green leaves on our trees. Thanks for the link.