The following was written October 6, but thanks to some issues making the Blogger post editor play nicely with a Mac--and being too crazy busy to troubleshoot those issues--I'm just now getting it posted.When I last posted, summer had just ended, but most of the summer stuff was still growing. Shortly after that post, we had a few nights of frost, which finished off the tomatoes, cucumbers, and winter squash. Amazingly, the basil and peppers (in large containers partly under eaves, next to a south-facing wall) are still hanging in there. Aside from those hold-outs, it's beginning to look a lot like fall around here. The aspens are golden, the cottonwoods are dropping leaves everywhere, and most of the summer flowers are done.
Thanks to the aforementioned cottonwoods, I had to climb into the pond to remove leaves, then throw a giant net over the whole thing to keep the rest of the leaves out. Fall leaves look lovely on the ground and sound lovely crunching underfoot. They are disgusting in a pond. They turn the water the color of iced tea, and they rot and foul the water, which is bad for the fish. So I got to spend about an hour up to my thighs in very cold, very nasty pond water. Good times.
I've also started the fall yard cleanup, ripping out spent tomato and squash vines. Soon--like tomorrow--I'll start clearing out weeds and layering manure over both old and new beds. Our cinder-y soil needs all the help it can get. The garden looks a lot different than it did even 2 weeks ago, now that the giant jungle of tomatoes is gone.
I love taking close-ups of my plants, mostly because they let me focus on the prettiest stuff in the garden and hide anything I think is less attractive. There are some especially beautiful combinations in the garden now, because the petunias are still going strong (someone forgot to tell them they're frost-tender), and the mums are in their full glory. The two together make for some lovely combinations.
And here's a glimpse of the entire side garden with those bright golden aspens in the background. Most of the year, aspens are a bit of a pain: they spread all over the place (mine have managed to tunnel under the driveway--seriously!), are prone to disease, drop weird catkin-like things (I dunno--maybe they are catkins) everywhere in the spring, and generally make nuisances of themselves. But for a couple of weeks in the fall, they glow like candle flames, and I almost forget to be annoyed with them.
It's now two weeks after the pictures above were taken, and the yard looks much the same, though the aforementioned aspens are mostly leafless now. Other than the one cold snap, we've had days in the 60s and 70s and nights in the 40s, so the flowers are still blooming. Tomorrow we're supposed to have a major windstorm (yay for gusts to 40 mph), so I suspect all the trees will be leafless by Saturday. One more slip down the slow slide to winter.
