My Half Acre of Paradise

This is our second day of a three-day series of very cold storms. We got the first snow to actually stick around in our yard yesterday. The kids had some fun sledding after school yesterday and today. The roads are icy and the driveway is impossible to shovel now with ice all over.

I still have about 15 small plants in plastic cups on my back deck from rooting cuttings this summer. I think I should bring them into the garage or somewhere less harsh, since the roots may get damaged by not being insulated in the ground.

I had to take my car to get new tires today, because the old ones were wearing out and lost all grip on the snow. Well, I did get 50,000 miles from those babies, so they lasted well for stock tires on a new car.

I’d better go out and bring those plants into the garage now.

I noticed some good suggestions for seed catalogs in the GardenWeb Annuals forum this week. Here are some of them:

• Swallowtail Garden Seeds from Santa Rosa, California
• Select Seeds from Connecticut
• Seedman from Mississippi
• Stokes Seeds from Ontario, Canada and Buffalo, New York - these guys have geranium seeds at a much better price than Thompson and Morgan.

Funny, they’re all “S” names. They look like they have some good potential. Seedman has a Thanksgiving weekend sale with 50% off everything.

Back around mid-September, we had a strong string of storms and I stopped watering my lawn and gardens around September 11th. Every week, we had one or two good storms through about mid-October. But since then, we’ve hardly had anything. It had looked like it was going to be a cold winter, but then we’ve been setting records for warmth off and on for a few weeks. It was in the 60s on Tuesday this week, and in the high 50s on other days.

I have a spot in my lawn that was looking a little sick, and I cut into the sod with a shovel to see if there were grubs underneath eating the roots. The surprise was that there were no pests, but the ground under the sod was bone dry! Most of the lawn looks good (still nice and green) but that spot on an incline must have drained water too easily back when it was getting watered, and it’s gotten very dry. I got the hose out and soaked it for a while. I might have to do that again.

The ski resorts are opening up now, so I guess the weather’s been OK up in the mountains, but I’m a little concerned about how we’re doing here in the valleys. It makes me worry that the big drought might be coming back after two good winters. Maybe it’s global warming. I enjoy the mild days, but at least some rain would be good for the rivers, lakes, and aquifers around here.

I finally remembered to pluck seeds from my Profusion Cherry Zinnias today. I have read a few conflicting things online about whether they’ll turn out true from seed, but I’m going to give them a try. This photo was taken back in August.

I also got some seeds from my orange French Marigolds that I planted in the corners of the vegetable garden. I’m not a marigold fan, but I do like these ones. They’re not big ball-headed flowers; they are more petite and simple. They look really nice. This photo was taken in September.

Next spring I plan to plant more annuals in my back flowerbed so I can have more constant color all summer. I’ll probably include some geraniums (the typical annual pelargonium kind), too. I am surprised how expensive their seeds are, though! Garden geraniums must be very specialized hybrids that are hard to create or something!

Look how rich and beautiful my backyard arbor looked just one week ago! And today, the leaves are almost all gone. Wind blew them away this week, and there goes the glory of autumn!

A few more shots: The one on left shows more of the tall Swedish Aspens by the arbor, and the one on right is my water birches in front of the house. We had some nice, rich golden colors last week.

I still have some yellow quaking aspens in the backyard, too, and they really are prettier than I remember them in past years. Some nice color appears for a week or less, and then they turn dark brown before the leaves actually fall. But for our other trees, most of the fall leaves have been blown off this week.

We’ve actually had a remarkable week for weather. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we had temps over 70 degrees! It was like spring! Then the temp dropped 30 degrees on Thursday, and we’ve had a little rain and a dusting of snow this morning from the night before. I even slid on some black ice on my drive to work. It was pretty scary. Despite the good days this week, we’re now on track for storm after wintery storm as far as the forecasters can see. It’s good though, because our fall has started to get too dry. It was pretty wet in September, but now we need more precipitation to have a healthy water year.