Glimpses Of Fall

It hasn’t felt much fall here until very recently.  We started October with record breaking high temperatures.  It finally cooled off on Saturday.  Our high was only 70 degrees.  On Sunday morning the temperature in the house was lower than what we had the thermostat set for.  It felt like fall.

We started the week off cooler.  Today was overcast and gray.  It felt chilly.  We warm back up to the mid 70s tomorrow, and have a chance of hitting 80 degrees in the next week.  Summer definitely doesn’t seem to be over yet.

Still, there are some glimpses of fall, especially today with the gray skies. 

The mums have come back.  It still surprises me a little bit whenever something I’ve planted comes back for another year.  And I had no idea how big they would get! 

Here's a closer view of the flowers.

The yellow ones aren't quite as big.  I may have gotten a little too enthusiastic when I tried to deadhead them.

They’re still pretty, though.  Here’s a closer view of the flowers. 

It’s not all fall plants, though.  One of the snapdragons from this spring is still blooming.  It’s dwarfed between the purple and yellow mums, but still going strong.  We also still have cherry tomatoes (even though we haven't planted them for a few years), but I didn't get a picture of them today.

My favorite mums are the ones next to the carport.  I think this burgundy is the perfect fall color.

Here’s a closer view of the flowers.  Don’t they just look like fall?

One of the bushes in our front yard is just starting to turn.

Here’s a slightly closer view of the changing leaves. 

And an even closer view of the changing leaves. 

So what about you?  Are you seeing some glimpses of fall where you are?  Or more than a glimpse? 

Plant Sales

I really hope you’re not getting tired of all of the plant related posts and pictures.  I’m justifying them by telling myself that most of you who read, or at least comment, regularly live in different regions, countries, or even continents, so hopefully I’m not showing you pictures of what you’re currently seeing in your own backyards.  It’s also my favorite time of year, and I get so excited over the plants and flowers.  This winter seems to have been particularly harsh and long, so I’m even more enthusiastic about plants and flowers than usual.

The local community college has a plant sale every year.  The horticulture program does it.  The plants are things the students have grown, and the money goes back into the horticulture program.  It’s one of the first places GrandMommy took me when she was cultivating my love of gardening.  I’ve gone every year since then (even though the first year going without her was really hard), and it’s something I look forward to every year.  They seem to have mostly vegetables, and the prices are better than the stores here, so it’s a great way to get the vegetable garden started every year.  The sale runs Thursday - Saturday, so I arranged to take a half day off of work yesterday so I could go plant shopping.

We’re changing things up a little bit with our garden this year; we’re scaling way back on the number of tomatoes we plant (we just don’t eat enough of them to justify the number I usually plant), we’re going to try growing corn this year (though it’s still early to plant it), we’re adding a few cucumber plants, and we’re trying a few eggplant plants.  We tried planting eggplant seeds last year, and absolutely nothing sprouted.  We think that’s probably because a certain three legged dog has a habit of rolling and digging in the raised beds, not because our yard isn’t eggplant friendly.  So we’re trying plants rather than seeds, in hopes that Duke won’t destroy those like we think he did the seeds.  We’re also sticking with planting kale, squash, and zucchini, from seeds.  We’ve had good results from that, and aren’t about to mess with a good thing.  The kale seeds are planted.  The squash and zucchini seeds with be planted either this weekend or next weekend.

So I had a pretty specific list when I went to the plant sale yesterday, which was good because I have a tendency to buy anything that looks interesting when it comes to plants.  Here’s what I bought: seedless cucumbers, a type of heirloom slicing tomatoes, eggplant, purple peppers (not on the list, but we like peppers, so I’ll find a spot for them), and two kinds of flowers (pink vincas and a lavender petunia).  I’m hoping the cucumbers do well because I really like the seedless ones, so it would be nice to grow our own.  Of course I’m interested to see how the eggplant does so we’ll know if we were right to blame Duke for last year’s eggplant failure.  I’m really excited about the purple peppers, just to have something a little different.  I’ve finally determined that when it comes to eating raw tomatoes I definitely prefer the heirloom/slicing variety.  I’m actually not a huge fan of Roma or cherry varieties.  Nick doesn’t have a preference other than not grape/cherry, so heirloom it is.

We also needed more garden soil, so we went to Lowe’s last night and bought several bags while we were there.  I had to look at the flowers, which leads to me buying flowers about 99.99 percent of the time.  We bought marigolds, yellow snapdragons, pink petunias, and these purple and yellow violas.  The violas were on the sale rack, even though they looked great to me.  I always check the sale rack. Sometimes the things on it clearly need a lot of attention, and I don’t buy those because I don’t have the skill set to nurse them back to health.  Sometimes, though, they seem to be on the sale rack just because the store may have a lot of them, and I’m delighted to buy those.  I’ve planted violas before, and they came back a second year, so I’m hoping these will too.  Even if they don’t I’m pretty to happy to have only spent $3.00 on flowers that were originally around $10.00.

Needless to say, we’ll be spending a large part of the weekend outside plating things, so I’ll probably have more flower pictures over the next few days.

How will you be spending your weekend?  Are you planting anything?  Have you been to any good plant sales lately?

The Lilac Bush, Three Years Later

I usually love it when the “you have memories” notification comes up on Facebook.  Most of the time it’s kind of fun to see what was going on exactly a year, or several, ago.  Sometimes it’s a good way to measure progress and see how much has changed.

This picture popped up today, from three years ago.

In 2015, the attorneys in my office gave me a gift certificate to a local nursery for Administrative Professionals Day.  That was a good year in the yard, so I was delighted with the gift certificate.

One of the things I bought with it was a lilac bush to plant in front of the house.  I had forgotten how small it was when we first planted it.

As you can see from these pictures, taken today, it really has grown a lot in three years.

I really, really like the bush, so I’m very happy it’s doing so well.  It smells great, and I love the flowers on it.

So what about you?  Do you like lilacs?  Do you enjoy it when Facebook informs you of memories for a specific day?

Yard

I have an ever-evolving relationship with yard work. As a child, I loved raking leaves. I think this was due in large part to my dad’s genius way of capitalizing on child labor. As a teenager and into my late 20s I hated yard work. I couldn’t understand why people would waste their hard-earned money, and their time, working in the yard. Then we bought our house and had a little yard of our very own.

That’s when my attitude toward yard work began to change. The first spring and summer we were here, I didn’t really do anything with the yard. Nick mostly kept up with cutting the grass. I made a few half-hearted attempts to maintain the flowerbeds that we here when we bought the house, but I’m pretty sure I did more harm than good.

The following year, Nick’s grandmother (GrandMommy) got involved. I think she pitied our poor yard. GrandMommy has a knack for growing things, and a very practical approach to yard work. If she’d even hinted at all of the things we’d eventually be doing in yard back then I’d probably have been tempted to go along with Nick’s idea of concreting everything and calling it a day. Fortunately she didn’t, and we started slow.

The first year GrandMommy got me set up with my first ever herb garden. I think that was brilliant on her part. It was small, and meant that one small part of the yard became something I enjoyed and actually wanted to take care of. It also helped that most of the herbs seemed very easy to grow, and that I love to cook.

After that, we began adding something else in every year. Some years we’ve added a few things. It seems to be a very practical approach; start small, learn as you go, and don’t start so many new things at once that you can’t manage them. We’ve cleaned up and added flower beds, as well as raised beds for growing vegetables. And we’re slowly taking out things that just don’t work for us

With GrandMommy’s help, I’m learning which flowers I like, and how to properly care for them. I find myself enjoying the yard and being proud of how it looks. I’ve come to enjoy the flowers, and now I think the effort involved in growing them is absolutely worth it. I’ve finally had the experience of walking into the backyard and picking fresh vegetables to make for dinner.

It’s still a little early in the season for quite a few things here, but there’s still plenty of color and beauty right now. The azaleas and some of the peonies are blooming. Some of the basil and tomato plants are in the raised beds (with more waiting to be planted), and it’s almost time to plant the squash and zucchini seeds. I’m hoping to do that this weekend.

The biggest change in the yard this year, though, is how much I want to be in it. I want to plant things and fill the yard with colorful flowers. I find myself wanting to plant things and pull weeds when I come home from work. In previous summers, my "reward" for cutting the grass was getting to go inside, the promise to myself that once it was done I didn’t have to do more yard work for a while. This year, even though cutting the grass is hard and sweaty work, I don’t mind it as much. And my "reward" for getting that job done? Planting flowers, pulling weeds, potting little flower arrangements for the porch. I never thought I’d feel that way.

The yard actually wasn’t my original plan for my Y post, but I’ve been spending so much time in lately that it just seemed like the perfect post. And I’m ridiculously pleased with the little potted arrangements on the porch. I love the colors of the pots and the color combinations of the flowers. This is the first time I’ve potted arrangements myself, and I have to say I’m very pleased with the outcome.

So what about you? Do you enjoy working in the yard? Do you have very many things in bloom right now?

Gardening

To say that gardening has never been my forte is a massive piece of understatement; I’ve hated it for most of my life, and have gone to great lengths to avoid it. I’ve never even cared much for house plants; they’ve never survived much longer than a week or two under my care. As a kid when it was my turn to water my mom’s yearly attempt at a garden I usually just stood outside with the hose running for a few minutes before going back to whatever I had happily been doing inside. I realize now this may be part of the reason why her gardens never survived for very long. As an adult I usually managed to rent places where the yard work and maintenance were the responsibility of the landlord. It didn’t matter that it cost a little more, I thought it was well worth the money. In my defense, I’ve always suffered from terrible seasonal allergies, am pasty, pale white, so burn in practically no time, and have always had a serious aversion to dirt and bugs. It just didn’t seem like gardening would combine well with me. I love to cook and bake, so I’m not a total loss domestically. But as they say, “the only constant is change”.

My husband (who hates the heat, which in his world is anything warmer than about seventy-five degrees, and by extension hates yard work, since it requires him to be out in the heat) and I bought our first home on September 30, 2010. Fortunately, at that time of year, there isn’t much yard work or gardening to be done here. Even better for us, the sellers had done a lot with the yard in an effort to get the place sold, so other than upkeep on what was already here, there wasn’t much that had to be done. We also had the sense to realize that people such as ourselves are happier with very small yards. Our plan was just to maintain what was already here. Well, we were hit with a wide range of problems, all of which I’m told are fairly common, in that first year. We barely kept the grass cut. I made a few half-hearted attempts at weeding, though I’m pretty sure I did more harm than good; we seem to have an abundance of weeds and appear to be missing some plants and flowers from last year. My “tug and see what happens; if it comes out easily, it’s probably a plant so put it back, if it’s stubborn, yank it out” method probably wasn’t the best for identifying plants versus weeds.

The yard began to look kind of sad. As spring approached (so quickly this year) we decided that we’d have to do something about the yard. This year we would do better than barely keeping the grass cut. All of our neighbors have nicely maintained, pretty yards. We saw the possibility for ours.

Fortunately, my husband’s grandmother is an avid gardener. Their yard is beautiful; she enjoys gardening, and is a wealth of knowledge. She came over and walked the yard with us; we determined what was beyond saving and needed to be pulled up, which areas needed more plants, and what needed attention most. She taught us how to trim and dead head, and pointed out which things were weeds and which were not. We also determined what to do with the very odd rock circle in the front yard. I’m not sure what the original idea was, but it’s a roughly three foot circle of rocks that have been cemented together. There was nothing planted in it when we moved in, and it looks sort of odd to have a rock circle with just grass in your front yard.

The rock circle is now the beginning of my herb garden. Grand Mommy suggested it because she said it gets the right amount of sun for an herb garden, and since I enjoy cooking so much an herb garden might interest me more. I think she was too polite to say, but thought that it might have a better chance of survival if I equated it with cooking rather than gardening. So began my herb garden.

We used a technique she calls lasagna gardening; you layer newspapers over the grass in the area you want to plant and then pour bagged soil on top of that, and then plant in that. It’s supposed to be an easier way to get started for those of us who aren’t enthusiasts. We have planted oregano, sage, parsley, rosemary, thyme, and garlic chives (something I’d never even heard of before). As you can see in the picture, they’re all still alive. They’re coming up on four weeks, which is a new record for me. We will be adding more this year, but I am told we will need to wait until a little later this month, as it still gets pretty cold at night right now.

I have also done some weeding and trimming, and a little more planting; irises, a money plant, and grape hyacinth. I have actually enjoyed it, much more than I thought I would. Gardening doesn’t bring me the same pleasure that baking a cake for loved ones or concocting a wonderful new dish does, but I have to say there is something deeply satisfying about it. Maybe it’s because the yard belongs to us, or maybe I’m a little more open to new things now. I’m really not sure. I just know that there is something deeply satisfying on an almost elemental level about digging in the dirt, in my own yard with the sun warming me, and planting herbs that I will later use in my kitchen.