Arrrgh!!!

We've had the most unusual fall! Our color change didn't begin until a week ago, and we are still not at the peak of color. We haven't had a frost yet, and usually our first hard frost comes early in October. We had a week with days in the 80s and days in the 60s.

We're beginning to see the red colors creep out in trees and shrubs. We have a fair amount of yellow, a bit of red, but still an unusual amount of green for so late in the season.

I spent about ten hours in the gardens and working on the grounds this past weekend. I had intended to start putting the gardens to bed, but everything is still growing or blooming! I cut back the spent flower heads on the garlic chives. In the past, I've left them, thinking that the animals would eat them, but it seems that nobody wants the seeds, and they lodge in crevices in and around the herb garden, and make more work. I'll have to take a shovel or spade to take out a few pods that are growing in inappropriate places.

I cut back the lemon verbena, which grows as an annual in Zone 5. I save the dried leaves for potpourri, and to give the house a lemony scent. I have one very large cookie sheet mounded with the leaves, and about as many more to strip from the plants. It's a shame we can't winter over lemon verbena.

I started cleaning out some of the container garden pots. Dear Husband made a huge "sieve" which sits over the wheelbarrow. I empty the pots into the sieve, and then separate the soil from the roots. The soil drops down into the wheelbarrow, and the screening catches things like plastic peanuts, or clay shards or glass pebbles. I began cleaning up the pots in the garage, and trying to reorganize the gardening tools, so that there would be more room for the over-sized containers when we finally get a frost.

I weeded the gardens along the front sidewalk, and cut back some of the iris leaves. We had such a bounty of volunteer plants this year that the iris were short on sunlight for part of the summer. They are fairly hardy plants and will enjoy the sunlight that will get to them for the next six weeks or so. The poison ivy.....yes...the plants that I was supposed to rip out this summer, have turned red. It should make them easier to remove, IF I can get enough time in the gardens this fall.

I started cutting back volunteer shrubs and trees in the gardens and around the house. I still need to use the brush-hogger to clear out two flower beds and an area on the west side of the house, but family obligations kept me from working all through the afternoon both days. It's probably just as well. My back has been crabby, and 16 hours in one weekend would have been a bad choice if I hope to get back into the gardens again, soon.

Soooooooo....we're enjoying the vagaries of fall, the whimsy of the weather, and the capriciousness of Mother Nature. Somewhere, those words must define the word "fall," don't you think?

Happy Autumn!