back to the garden

Thank you for all the very kind sentiments. I know now what a virtual hug is.

A summer of wordless Wednesdays has gone by. I was in a writing funk. Every time I sat down to write, my mind felt like a black hole, stuff went in, but I couldn’t get anything out. On my trips back and forth from Chicago, I had all kinds of ideas, but they all went flat once I got home.
It seems like only a little while ago that Pat and I were shoveling 10 yards of sweet peet and 5 yards of gravel. Now we are trying to guess when the last weekend before the first killing frost will be. We want to put in a couple more flower beds in the front yard (my battle against turf grass will never cease) and we need a place to winter all the perennials we have in pots. Dumping five yards of sweet peet in the fall gives our garden a real boost in the spring (only 5 months or so away). I know we weren’t going to get any more containers this year, but maybe we can try that again next spring. That will give me time to get a couple more for the new beds.
We broke our precipitation record last week, and we’ve still got two months of snow-induced traffic jams to look toward. I thought I was imaging it but it really rained every other day, or was it every weekend. I know, I know. All the rain could be snow. The back yard is as wet today as it was in March. It’s great for the new perennials we acquired, easy for weed pulling, but lousy for walking off the paths. Everything in the garden grew like crazy because of the rain. I mean everything. I was weeding after a week away and came across an 8 foot weed. For crying out loud, weeds bigger than me. We had bird seed growing everywhere. We had our own amber waves of grain growing in the back yard. I told Pat that we could grow our own bird feed. That, or maybe hook some kind of farm implement to the back of the Aztec and harvest the stuff.
There are still flowers that think it’s summer. A daisy bloomed yesterday and we have anemone and hibiscus blooming. We planted a boatload of mums in late August, so they will probably winter over. I thought we got white and yellow mums, but they seem to have a way of morphing into different colors. Just as long as they winter over, I don’t care what colors they are. The impatiens are in their early fall burst. We discovered that deer don’t like begonias. They thrived in our deer infested back yard.
Hey, maybe I’m out of my funk.