It’s time to starting turning the garden into fall.  Cleaning out the tired annuals, planting bulbs and fall perennials. 

The bed looks a little empty without the tall annuals:

The new drill bit works pretty well for planting.  I did 30 bulbs in 30 minutes.  It took me a few minutes to get the hang of it.

I found it easier to pull the drill in and out a few times to get the dirt out. Also, if you rotate the drill around a little, you can make the hole wider, which is good for some of the bigger bulbs.  You do have to make sure you don’t have roots in there or they catch on the drill. I was going to plant bulbs on the side of the house where we haven’t turned the bed over yet and there were too many roots in the ground to make holes. All in all, this certainly is helping. I think having the soil a bit more moist would help as well.

My agastache is still blooming:

The agastache have really been workhorses in the garden. Long blooming and they just always look good. I haven’t needed to deadhead them or do anything other than water them.

I planted a baby calycanthus in the spring that looked like this:

Now is like this:

It sent out 2 really long branches. I have a question in to Bluestone about whether I should prune those back to match the shorter, smaller growth or see if the other branches will catch up. It is supposed to be a shrub at some point.  It’s such a young plant that I am not quite sure what to do with it.

I have another flush of blooms happening on the Fair Bianca:

There are a ton of buds on this, too.  I love that late season flush of rose blooms!

There is a bloom on the Enchanted Evening as well, with more buds popping.

My snapdragons are just piles of greenery with some stems sticking out. Lesson learned that I need to stake these tall ones and stake them early.

The globe thistles sent out some more blooms. Quite late, too, although I certainly don’t mind!

This weekend is dragging out some fall stuff for decorating. I took a break from work today and went shopping for some base decorations.  I got a couple hay bales and some 2 bushel baskets:

John and I need to do some planning and stuff on how to decorate – then implement. John maybe not so willingly pulled into that LOL!

We should have good weather for long riding this weekend as well!