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. :)