It’s cold right now, but we are supposed to have temps reaching almost 60 next week!! Plus we can see the ground because the snow is pretty much all melted. That makes me want to talk gardening, so I will do that here. John’s eyes glaze over a lot when I’m talking about the garden  😆  At least he can name some plants now, which is a start.

I am making plans for the gardens — like I haven’t been doing that all winter, right?  I did a lot of plant shopping in January at the 50% ordering sale from various vendors. Good thing I did that before all the medical bills came or I wouldn’t be ordering anything now  🙄 

Some of what is coming include an Annabelle hydrangea:

I got this because it is cold hardy to zone 4. It will grow to 5 feet or a little more, but I got a small baby one for cost reasons.

These are from American Meadows (I’m using their pictures). That’s a new company for me. I got some iris rhizomes from them last fall and decided to order again.

One of my goals with my garden is to be pollinator and bird friendly. On the bike paths, we see a lot of Joe Pye Weed and it is a butterfly magnet. However, it grows 6 feet tall and that’s just too big for my garden. I was really excited to see they have come out with a baby Joe!  And it was 50% off, so I about punched a hole in the keyboard getting that into my cart.

This will only get 2-3 feet tall, so a good size for a backyard garden.

I’m also in love with floxgloves. I had a couple last year and  Debby sent me some pretty white ones. American Meadows had one on sale that I probably bought more for the name: Candy Mountain.

Remember that song from O Brother Where Art Thou?

Oh, I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall and the wind don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

So yeah, I’ll be singing that when I’m working in the garden. 

American Meadows has a sale going on now. It’s not 50%, but discounted at any rate. (Do not purchase anything, Lori)

I’ll talk about the other orders in the future. It will be like Christmas come May!

The growing season is just about done around here.  We are getting freezing temps this weekend, which will toast pretty much anything left. 

It’s still good for planting perennials, though.  I couldn’t resist another end-of-season sale from Hosta’s Direct on Heuchera and got 5 more baby plants for $3.95 each!

I contacted them today about planting with the freeze coming and they suggested waiting until Monday when the temps will be back in the 30s overnight. 

One last globe thistle is blooming now:

The hydrangea has totally turned pink now from white:

It’s perfect for today’s pink picture!

There are a few stray blooms on the butterfly bush as well.

More buds on the rose bushes, too.  I am going to cover this and hope it survives the freeze. This is the Enchanted Evening.

Then there is the cardinal flower:

I really hope I can protect the foxglove as well. It has a large spike that is only about half open right now.

I love the purple speckled throats on these blooms, don’t you?

The Fair Bianca still has oodles of flowers and buds on it:

I’ll be covering that up as well.  I can bring the potted mums into the garage overnight, so those will be okay.  Not sure about the black-eyed Susan, though:

Last gasp of the snapdragons as well:

Still a lot going on in the garden, actually. I need to neaten up the fall display this weekend once the rain passes through.

We have our carving pumpkins! Gotta get ready for the carving party 😀  Not sure if biking will happen or not this weekend. Rainy Saturday and pretty cold Sunday. Not to mention we have a lot of projects underway… again.

I still have blooms!  And not just fall blooms, either. I had to sneak outside during a break in the rain to get some photos, so everything is going to be wet!

The Fair Bianca has more blooms on it now than it did in June when I first got it. This rose smells amazing, too. It meets all criteria for me in a rose: reblooming, fragrant, hardy, disease resistant. Guess that is why it is here in my garden…

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The moon flower has more buds on it.  We had a really, really cold night that got into the 30s last week and it nipped a lot of mature buds, but some of the tiny ones survived and now are ready to open.

I like the mature buds as much as the open flowers!

Debby had sent me some foxgloves and I also had some from Bluestone that I planted. I was expecting them to flower probably next year, but I looked out the other day and saw a spike growing!

This is called Pam’s Choice Split. I am excited about the blooms because that means seeds and more flowers for next year! Hooray for free!

I need to get in the bed when it is drier to get more photos of this. My pantlegs got all wet from brushing against stuff.  The things I do for this blog.

Snapdragon:

My mums are looking good for fall:

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I also got some kale, which I have in small pots:

Not a huge fan of the kale, decorative or eating 🙂  It does have nice color in the fall, though, and it lasts into frost.  And it does have pink in it for the pink picture!

The front garden is fairly bursting with unorganized color and I love it.

It wasn’t until later that I noticed one of my mum pots had fallen off the hay bales. Can you spot it?

We will have a typical fall weekend around here. There are lots of festivals around and I will be on the hunt for some fall color with my camera!

It’s getting near the end of the what’s blooming posts.  That’s a little sad. There are still some things happening, though, including the last flush of rose blooms.  This is the enchanted evening:

This will be today’s pink picture as well.  Please click here to support free mammograms!

I am playing around with focus here:

Fair Bianca:

We have the front yard set up for fall now:

We got a white pumpkin. I have always wanted to get one to decorate with, so I did this year!

Mums:

The moon flowers keep sending out blooms.

They really are so lovely:

I am trying a photo optimizer to hopefully let photos load quicker. They don’t need to be as huge as they come off my camera to show on the internet, so I am going to try this out.

Not much fall color on the trees yet. We were hoping there would be more to show John’s folks while they are here, so we might go into the Adirondacks this weekend and see if there is more color.

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!

I have a couple new blooms to show this week!  Nothing like late bloomers (see what I did there?)

I still am stuck on close up shots of the garden. Looks like a Daddy Longlegs on the coneflower.

Did you know that DLL is not really a spider?  I saw some science show the other day that said that.

Off to the back yard. This is the back patio work in progress. The middle windows are the dining room that overlook the back. From the front of the house, that is the ground level, but we have the walkout basement.

To the right of that tree is the in-progress shade bed.  This was one of my plants I just put in there. Solomon Seal:

The hydrangea flowers are starting to turn pink now.

Some of the blooms are amazingly massive and weight down the whole branch.

That’s one bloom!

So, I planted 3 types of flowers by seed this year. I did french marigolds, moonflowers and teddybear sunflowers.  Two of those are just blooming now.  Here are the teddybears:

I know they are supposed to be a dwarf sunflower, but these are tiny!  Not sure what happened with them. They don’t look like the picture on the seed package.

Autumn Joy sedum, now in color.

Cardinal flower:

This one kind of glows in the evening light. It’s very pretty.

I also have what I believe is some kind of bittersweet maybe:

I left this up. It can be kind of invasive, and actually this is pulling heavily on the shrub that it is intwined in, so I will probably remove it.

Out front I am just about ready to pull the cosmos and the remaining cleome.  I think I might get some hay bales and put pumpkins out or something to fill the space.  The cosmos have a few blooms left and a bunch of new seedlings, actually. I am going to leave those and see how big they get before frost.  Anyway, a birdie must have dropped a seed here because a little wild sunflower popped up.

I was beginning to think my moonflowers were never going to bloom this year and I walked out the other day and boom – I saw a huge bloom!

There are a lot more buds, too, which look pretty neat:

Moonflowers open up at dusk and close in the morning sun. They are like the opposite of  morning glories.  The blooms are very fragrant – and the plant is poisonous, so don’t eat it.

I’m glad to finally get some blooms on these. I do seem to have trouble growing plants from seed.  I might invest in a grow light to do more annuals indoors this winter and start them earlier.

We hope to see more balloons this weekend and go on a hike. The weather should be pretty nice to be outside.  It’s just about my favorite time of year!

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It’s now actually starting to seem a little more like fall and less like summer.  Still plenty of bloom time left, though. Fall always seems like black-eyed Susan time to me.  Maybe because they bloom for so long and are still around after other stuff starts to fade.  This is called Tiger’s Eye.

There are all these fancy names for the varieties and they mostly look the same to me.  🙂

Couple of macro shots.  This is a dahlia.

Fairy impatien:

I dug up all the hostas on the side of the house.  I kept 2, which I put in the shade bed.  That uncovered this yard ornament that I kind of forgot about:

The next pictures are all with the 70×300 zoom lens. This is playing with the focal point. I took a few shots focusing on the front or rear flower.

I have been using a small f-stop, which makes the background blurry, which I think is pretty cool.

My delphiniums are blooming again.  They are much shorter with this flush of blooms:

One of my coral bells:

I do leave those plant ID markers in the ground with all my plants. That way come spring after the snow has  melted and the ground is totally dead, I know where stuff is supposed to come up.

Now for some fauna.  John and I were having lunch outside and it was a complete menagerie in the back yard.

Nuthatch:

Nuthatches are such funny birds.  This is a typical pose for them with the neck at an L angle. It looks so uncomfortable!

Male cardinal.

And I finally got some shots of the hummingbird.  This is a tricky little bugger!

I will work on some overview shots this week of the garden instead of the closeups.  

I have some fall plants arriving this weekend!  Gotta do some planting.  Looks like Saturday morning/early afternoon for riding will be the only good weather.  Not sure where we are going yet, probably back down to Saratoga.  On a good note, the alligator trunk will be going to its new home this weekend!

I have been making progress on the shade bed.  It’s actually all along the fence on one side, but I am only concentrating on this one area of it right now.   I have been clearing and planting as I go.  I tackled the hardest part last weekend.  This area was full of ground cover when we moved in.  I cut all that growth down in the spring and I have now been ripping up all the root systems that were matted in.

It’s been a lot of work to get to this point.  The roots were matted terribly:

This stuff was all throughout the bed.

This was the bed originally:

Tick country and so.much.work.   It’s all pretty much ready for planting now. I am not sure how much I will be planting this fall other than a few plants and a ton of bulbs.  I do have some Solomon seal for the shade bed coming, though.

But who am I kidding?  I will be on the lookout for plants all fall!  I did put in my baby Heuchera!

The big ash tree is dropping so many leaves already.  It makes quite a mess, I have to say.  Anyway, I love the foliage colors on these.  I think this is going to be my new favorite shade plant!

My new camera arrived today, so here is me goofing around with it a little bit.

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I need to work on the bird pictures.  They move too quick! This is either a downy or hairy woodpecker.

Female or juvenile cardinal.

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The shy bowling ball shocked at being caught on camera:

I have so much to learn about this camera.  It’s pretty complex.  Or, I guess it is really easy to use for a novice, but the opportunity is there to take control over all the functions and take even better pictures.  Good thing that you don’t have to pay for film developing anymore!  It would cost a fortune with the amount of pictures I take – and will be taking 😀

More fall plants arrived for planting now.  I bought some from a wholesaler, so they are tiny baby plants.  These are heuchera (and one heucherella).

That’s 4 plants in this bowl (getting a drink) 😀   I got them from Hostas Direct.  The heuchera are Peppermint Spice, Plum Sugar and Spellbound.  The heucherella is Sweet Tea.  I guess I went with the food sounding ones! The website says with plants this small, they go through 3 stages. The first year they sleep, the second year they creep and the third year they leap.  It’s hard to be patient, but I was able to get 4 plants at a good price.  I am kind of loving the heucheras for the shade garden.

Front bed is waning a bit.  I started removing some of the cosmos and cleome that were getting dried out.  I told John I wanted to go all out with fall decorating this year.  We will see if that actually happens 😉 .  My foxglove is blooming again:

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I have been letting this go to seed and I am going to steal some to put along the back fence and see if they come up next year.

Firecracker sedum:

I really do like this color.  I have 2 plants now because I broke a big chunk off of this plant on accident. I stuck it in water and it rooted and then I put it in the ground.  Sedums are kind of hard to kill, so I wasn’t surprised this worked. This was  a free plant, too.  It’s the plant that keeps on giving!

Agastache love:

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I was saying to John that the garden beds are like a baby this year. Next year it will be a toddler and then the year after that it will be mature.  I will be making another baby bed next year, too 😀

More globe thistle blooms:

The hummingbirds like these.  

I planted a tiny Russian sage earlier this year.  It’s in sleeping stage 😀

I really planted this too close to another plant, but I won’t worry about that this year.

This is Autumn Joy Sedum:

It hasn’t really even started to change color yet.  I got the original of this plant from one of my flip houses. Then I planted it at our old house, divided it  a few years later and gave some to my mom. Then I took a chunk with me to this house.  So – that one plant is now in 4 different places.  You can mess with sedum quite a bit.

My chair in the back:

Spike plants are always really cheap and they certainly add drama to pots.  Petunias are not my favorite flower, but they do bloom endlessly with very little care.

This weekend I will be splitting some irises. If anyone wants any rhizomes, shoot me an email (javaqueen01@yahoo.com) and I will try to send some.  And lots of work to do on the shade bed.  Not to mention a bike ride. We are going for the cupcake ride again after being thwarted last week!

As I said yesterday, it’s been a little hot to work in the garden much except at the bookends of the day.  I did see a sign at one of the nurseries by our house that had 50% off perennials!  So, you know I had to check it out.

They had a clearance on annuals and for some reason they had perennial agastache in annual pots for $2.  I am currently in love with that flower, so I picked up one of them.  And I got this Salvia to stick in the back for the hummers.

I also got a columbine and a heuchera for the shade garden.  

I also figured I would try the shasta daisy.  For whatever reason, that is a flower that I like, but it doesn’t like me.  However, this one was only $3 so I figured I would try again:

I really need to concentrate on shade plants now.  I have a giant flower bed to fill up!

The irises that I planted just a week ago actually are taking hold – all 3 of them. I was surprised at the early growth:

That bodes well for them getting nicely established before winter.  Yay!  I can’t believe I am already excited about next year’s flowers.  😳

The cardinal flower:

It’s such a beautiful color.  They talk about this as a hummingbird magnet and it’s true!  There were 2 of them on it today.  I have a couple other small cardinal flowers that didn’t bloom this year, so I will be set next year!

I seem to do really well with nurturing plants back from the dead or just regular plants, but I struggle with plants from seed. I planted some marigold and teddy bear sunflowers back in spring and they are so small still:

Maybe by Thanksgiving they will be blooming.  🙄 

I cut my delphinium down after they were done blooming and now new growth and blooms are appearing:

Enchanted Evening:

For a first year bare root rose, there have been a lot of blooms. 

Last gasp of the lily:

I am going to go back and look for more of these, which should be on clearance because they will be past bloom.  I wish I could just drop a bunch of money and buy whatever I want, but with so much space to fill, I have to get the biggest bang for my buck, even though it means patience for the first couple of years.

The hydrangea has the craziest huge blooms on it.  Check this out. My hand holding the bloom is splayed out and you can’t see it.

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I harvested some blooms for inside. I usually don’t bring in too many flowers from the garden because I like to leave them out there to last longer, but I will be pruning this anyway in the fall.  Of course, as soon as I brought in the bouquet and set it on the table, Pixie started chomping on it, so I have to put it out of reach.  This is why I can’t have nice things.

The rain came through last night and the weather will be just about perfect for a ride tomorrow. High of 80 and sunny.  Yay!  I sense a cupcake coming on 😀