September!!

Hardy Hibiscus, finally in bloom!

 

September. The rain we needed in July is happening again today. That’s ok, because I needed to make pasta sauce with the ripe paste tomatoes, but it’s also cold, which is slowing down the tomato-ripening. And that’s  ok, because it’s easier to sleep in cool weather, and it’s easier to do the kinds of work in the garden that involves hauling around heavy things and crawling around under blueberry bushes to chop stuff out – except that it’s raining. So I’m not.

My current list of things to do in the garden includes:

• Finish putting bricks in front of the garage, after The Husband fetches more bricks from the pile of abandoned, used ones a friend said we could scavenge

• Tie up the trumpet vine and wisteria vine

• Manure and mulch the clematis



Fall bouquets of gladiolus, amaranth, Bells

• Fix the end of the soft pathway into the field - pavers, bricks, something, but do some serious weeding first

• Redo the old potato-bag space and finish the new potato-bag space The Husband started – get half cement blocks, dig up the weeds between it and the old wall, prepare it for planting next spring

• Plant the miniature rose that’s on the wart



Beautiful okra blossoms

• Put pavers and pebbles around the new wind-thingy so it doesn’t fall over this winter

• Finish fertilizing the fruit trees and raspberries

• Cut out old raspberry canes as soon as they’re done producing

• Mulch old raspberry bed with new hay and new raspberry bed with straw, and come up with some sort of fencing for latter



Lots and lots of apples this year!

• Finish putting down cardboard mulch and covering with cedar chips in the blueberries

• Re-cedar the soft path en

• Ask the Barkie Boys’ ashes if they’re ready to go live outside, or if they need another winter inside near the couch. Don’t cry while doing this.

• When it’s just a little cooler (and dryish) bring the indoor plants indoors, and bring in also the solar lights on the wart and in the garden

• When it's even cooler, dump the annuals into the compost bins and store the pots once they’ve dried out

• Finish the new garage east-wall planting area; it needs something



The owl and the Bells of Ireland

• Order perennials and plant them when they come

• Figure out where  to put them first, which means make that perennial map I’ve been avoiding all summer

• Mark the perennials so I don’t weed them out next spring like I suspect I did last spring, and so I don’t plant over them with new perennials – use cheap chopsticks? And the map – make the damned map, already!

• Keep picking and processing tomatoes, runner beans, summer squashes, green beans, and  greens as they’re ready, continue to monitor the winter squashes and when they’re ready, pick them for storage, and don’t forget the remaining parsley root, carrots, and beets

•  Yank out veg plants that are no longer productive and add to compost bins

• Turn the square in front of the dragon into a cedar-chipped interesting spot

•  Store bean towers and tomato cages and pots and wart furniture and so on, don’t forget the hoses!



Scarlet runner and fava beans

•  Keep weeding

• Put lots of wood chips under the apple tree. Nag The Husband about making wood chips. Nag again. And again…

• Pick the pears – how does one tell they’re ready, again? Enlist the Tall Dude to help, I’ll never reach them all

•  Pick and dry the remaining Bells of Ireland – sniff sniff sniff, incredible fragrance!

• Don’t forget to pull and dry the gladiola corms when they’re done

• Make the corn experiment spot more permanent



The first fruit of the corn experiment. Other veggies in shot for size comparison!

• Start to weed out some of that marjoram that’s ‘way too vigorous

• Put out stakes so snowplows don’t run into blueberries and rock-like-things walls

• Weed some more

• Get wrap and wrap the trunks of the new fruit trees so the field mice don’t feast on them this winter

Well, that’s part of it, and that’s only the main things on the outdoors list. Clearly, some of those things won’t need to be done right away, but September’s melting away faster than expected!

This is the time of year when everything in Nature seems to be hesitating, and listening carefully, carefully. The cricket song has changed, the bird song is changing and some have left us already, as have some butterflies and other insects. There’s a sweet contented feeling in patches of sun, my garden toad family seems to be very busy, and you can almost hear pumpkins and winter squash ripening.

This unknown plant sprung up in my green bean bed. I can't seem to get a good picture of it, which makes me think it was planted by aliens. I've never seen the flower - you can see a blur of leftover yellow petal - but it makes these interesting pods afterward. The heart-shaped leaves belong to it.  If anyone knows what it is, please tell me!

I think that Buzzy Boy has migrated, but one of the Buzzys is still here – I’m assuming Buzzy Girl; I get buzzed when I’m in the garden near the scarlet runner beans, especially, but the buzzer isn’t holding still long enough for me to come up out of my bend, locate the buzzer, and get glasses on so I can see if there’s a red throat or not. Buzzy Boy would usually wait so we could lock eyes. But then, his feeder is still emptying pretty quickly, so I’m not sure. Whoever it is, they’ll be gone soon, the light and temperature has changed and little tiny birds won’t be able to subsist here much longer.

My freezers are filling quickly, and the big sunflowers, at least, are heavy-headed with seeds. There are many bees still busy, busy, very very busy amongst the beans and smaller, many-flowered sunflowers, the cosmos and calendula, the scarlet runner flowers, the marjoram flowers, the fall raspberries and the fall flowers that are just starting to open or are long bloomers – asters, fall clematis, goldenrod, tansy, gladiolas, speedwell  veronica, lady’s thumb, hardy hibiscus, helenium, anemone, Black-eyed Sue, some late wild daisies, Lady’s Thumb, foxglove, pincushion flower, Love Lies Bleeding, thyme and mint, and the ever-taller, still beautiful, amaranth.

I fished out my fall scarf  today, and the silk wrapped ‘round my chilly neck is comforting and warming. Time to get out all the scarves, and maybe even the fingerless mittens. I expect we’ll have warm, maybe even humid, weather again this season before we’re done, but in this part of the world, you can’t be sure.

In the meantime: glorious, gorgeous world, with maples starting to flare, and the smell of warm earth and vegetation starting to die back and become humus. Wood stacks grow, the Enfield Harvest People are starting to arrive, apples are ripe and ready, and even my corn experiment has produced one small ear with pretty normal-sized kernels – amazing!

And there’s an amazing, orange baby toad in my garden. September can be magical.

 

 

The amazing, baby orange toad on a mottled summer squash leaf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All photos Debra Marshall