Here we are at the last week of October. The flowers have been more or less done for a few weeks now. I manage to get a tiny bouquet for myself gathered to grace the kitchen, but even Mom is done with getting flowers. I have loved every minute of it and I hope you have as well. These are two of my late season bloomers. I have no idea why they took so long to bloom for me, but I am grateful that they bloomed before our hard freeze.
All of the plantings are now done. Fini, Complete. What a job that was. I had scored a bunch of peony divisions last week, thank you Carolyn. I went to get them into the garden and realized that where I wanted to plant them just wasn’t going to work. I had a back row of misfit or unknown peonies, then a row of narcissus. The only open bed was below the recently planted narcissus. I thought to myself. No problem. Those bulbs have only been in for about two weeks if that, I will simply dig them out, keeping the varieties correctly labeled, plant the peonies in that row and in the empty bed, replant the 100 narcissus. Well, it went like this. I got about five bulbs dug out and quickly replanted them. I was far easier to replant two lilacs that had only been in since spring than to replant 100 narcissus. So I moved more rocks so I could plant the lilacs, then re jiggered the already unknown peonies to make space for the new ones. Sheesh.
Now that every thing is safely tucked in the ground, we are tilling up the new garden beds that I had been dreaming about all year. As you can see, tilling hasn’t improved any. Here we have a lovely hedgerow of rocks, ready to be picked up by the tractor bucket and dumped.
The weekend was spent dismantling the flower beds, which entails cutting down the spent flowers so the netting can be removed, then cutting them stems to the ground. Then pulling the weed mat up, taking up the drip hose and getting that rolled up and put away. Lucky for me Steve had done about four of the beds. The dahlias are still in, I haven’t had a freeze hard enough to really kill them yet, but hopefully by the end of the week that will happen. The cleaned beds have had compost added, and will have mulch spread on top.
Here is a drone shot of the flower garden, I think it is pretty cool looking. I think that this is the final size. It has to be. I am running out of places to go!
I leave you with my last flower image of the year. I think. This stem of flowering cabbage is a bouquet in itself.
Until next week. Allie