Beautiful October

The weather is still absolutely fantastic, and I'm feeling well enough to get back out into the garden! A quick view of the garden now:

hummingbird feeding station
they're still around in October!

sunflower that I swear I didn't plant


the roses look great in Fall


calendula

trinidad scorpion
hottest pepper in the world


carrots


cherry tomatoes


kale and chard

basil

After cleaning out some of the dead stuff in my flower borders, it was nice to see the pretty blooms that are still there; it also gave me a chance to see what areas could use a few new perennials for next year. I love October plant sales. I got these 5 perennials


for $6 total. (The pack of pansies was an additional couple $. The sign said they will live through winter and bloom in Spring. We'll see if that works.) Seriously, fall-sale perennials are one of the best ways to build a garden cheaply! I also recommend buying small mum plants this time of year. The 3" mums won't look too exciting this year, but if you plant them in the ground now, they will be gigantic $20 mums by this time next year. This is also the time to buy Spring bulbs. They're one of the absolute best parts of Spring, and you can never have too many, so there's no reason not to go plant at least a few new ones!

So with those new perennials, I'm going to work on my front yard garden. There are parts of it I really like


but altogether it's... underwhelming.

So, I've started work on that, and hopefully I'll have it looking a little better before the freezing weather hits! I'm also going to add a little something to the boring garage garden... it's just not landscaped for Fall.


I think the addition of a couple dying, potted, crusty mums that didn't get watered over the summer will help a lot!

Another area I'm thinking about sprucing up is the area between the open patio and the under-the-deck patio. These hostas just look brownish and tired, even earlier in the season, and I think it's time they were replaced, or at least divided. We're going to need something smaller there anyway, once Mike builds the steps in place of that stack of concrete blocks.


Lastly, here are pictures from our most recent trip to the apple orchard. Almost every single one of the apples was picked, but we found a couple, and bought the rest in the shop. The best part was the branch full of tiny apples I kept for decoration. Mike tried them and they tasted horrible. He didn't want me to spend $2/ lb for horrible tasting apples just to look pretty, but I did anyway. :)

Fall is Here

It seemed like a long, hot summer! Not much to post, because I've barely had the energy to get off the couch to work in my beautiful flower gardens. It's been for a good reason, though, as noted in the ticker to the right that shows the latest size of fruit I'm growing!

The summer heat finally really broke a few days ago. I came out of work in the evening and noticed it was actually a little cool out. That night it frosted in some areas of Iowa, but it seems to have spared our backyard, and the weather has been Fallish since.

Although I haven't had much of an appetite for vegetables, I've been happy to have homegrown produce on hand when I've really wanted it, like tonight for Mike's homemade potato soup. Used up all the carrots in the pot pie last week? Of course not, just go pull some more out of the ground! And they taste way better than the grocery store ones, too!

Mike also was able to go to the Seed Savers Annual Tomato Taste Testing this year, where visitors vote on the best tasting tomato of the year. He does a great job saving seeds from his favorites each summer, but he always has so many new varieties that he wants to try that I think he'll keep buying just as many new seeds every year!

He was also super excited to find out that he is officially growing the hottest pepper in the world. The most recent testing found the Trinidad Scorpion hot pepper to be the hottest there is, and he is so proud to have some of those growing in our own little planter.

I have a few ideas for my decorative gardens this Fall- spruce up the shade garden (most things have died due to lack of water-- the house protects it too well from rain!), move some ratty looking hostas bordering the patio and put something more interesting in (more hostas? mums?), and move some perennials that look like they belong elsewhere before the weather gets cold. And, post a few pictures to this blog sometime so you can see what's up in the garden!

Hopefully you're enjoying a nice harvest from your own backyard or your favorite farmer's market. I'm already looking forward to planning the next garden for Spring!