‘Dig’ The Earth

Our first snow of the season and it has to be a yucky one. Monday morning it started snowing and it left about an inch on the roads. Tuesday it was more of the same until about 6 PM.

Wet, heavy, slippery snow started to fall in blankets across the landscape. Great for plants, bad for driving. I called my mom who’d come to visit us earlier in the day with dad and they were on their way home at about 8:30 PM. They’d been trying to get a hold of my brother because he had stayed to work late with DH. Dad wanted me to convey the message that if he could stay where he was to do so. The roads were treacherous and the visibility low.

By the time I called DH to let him know they had already left the office. The next 45 minutes was tough. This will be 4 years since our bad accident that left my husband broken and my car in pieces. The last thing anyone wanted was for that to happen again. I had a knot in my stomach and I thought for sure I was going to lose my supper. Finally at :15 after 9 DH walked in the door and I could relax. Then my thoughts went to my brother. He lives with my parents an hour north and therefore in the middle of the heavier snowfall.

Thankfully he was also OK. I called him an hour after my DH got home just to make sure he’d made it home OK. He said you couldn’t even see the main roads and that the country road they live on was like a washboard with drifts of snow 5″ deep. Yikes.

Today we are in for lots of wind, rain and snow. There is actually a wind warning in our area. You can hear the wind howling or “talking” as my daughter calls it outside the house. It’s a little unnerving. Hopefully we didn’t leave anything in the yard that will get blown away by the 70 MPH gusts.

The weather has turned colder.  It’s as if the calendar told the weather, “Hey, it’s October.  It’s time to get cold.”  And it certainly did.  We went from a balmy 80 the week before to mid 50s and low 60s all last week.  There is hope for 70 degree weather this week which would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.

There are still some fall cleanup and and preparation tasks that need to be undertaken in my garden and yard.  Weeding, soil amending, sowing cover crops, planting spring blooming bulbs and mulching are all on my list.  I actually considered starting my winter sowing project a little early this year.  Most of the seeds that should grow after being in a period of cold/freezing weather are from plants that self seed.  Setting them in the mini-greenhouses merely gives them protection from the animals and elements for the season until the spring.  For being almost 7 months pregnant this seems like a long, almost impossible list.  Today my gardening has been reduced to indoor herb gardening since I can’t get outside in the cold rainy weather.

About a month ago I spent the day with my mom and I found a cute glass jar with growing medium and basil seeds.  I love basil and gardening so I thought I’d give it a try.  Unfortunately, it did not dawn on me to take a picture of the soil pellet before I added water so you could see just how much it fluffed up.

What gardening tasks are you still undertaking?

This week the weather has been in the low 70′s and beautiful. Not until today have we had rain. All the windows in the house were open until yesterday when the temperature peaked above 80 and the house was getting too warm. The only downside to this is that with all sun and no rain even as mild as it was the plants still needed to be watered. There was a lot of lugging of hoses this week. The water we use in the yard comes from our well and has the distinct smell of sulfur – yuck!

In any event in the front yard the dianthus had finished blooming and needed to be trimmed back. The artemisia shrub that was behind them grew to such an extent that it covered over much of the dianthus, so I decided to move the dianthus. I split the plants and started to get them planted around our cistern top. The cistern top had been a huge point of contention because all the bulbs and corms I planted there last fall didn’t make it through the winter and weeds took over before I was well enough to go back outside again. It really did look like a jungle. That is gone now and I moved a few hostas there and planted the dianthus. I also have some vinca that I’d like to plant around it to brighten the area with some pretty blooms.

The decision to move the hostas to the front in full sun was a hard one. I had always learned that hostas do best in shade and don’t like full sun much at all. The more I look around though I am finding more and more plantings of variegated varieties in full sun and even some full green varieties there as well. The green varieties tend to bleach a bit, but I haven’t seen much in the way of burning of the edges. So, we’ll just have to see how they do.

My plan is to keep them well watered so that even on hot summer days the hostas won’t scorch. An idea I saw was to use old 20 oz. plastic bottles as watering containers for thirsty plants or container plantings. Just by punching a hole in the cap with a hot nail or a drill, filling the bottle with water, putting the cap back on and burying it cap side down up to the bottle collar close behind the plant you want to keep watered you’ll have a constant flow of water when it’s needed. I guess the concept is to take advantage of the vaccuum that is formed when the inverted bottle is buried in the soil. Water only leaks out when there is air from the soil to leak in. I’m going to give it a try and hope that they escape the husband radar .