Garden fairies here!
We are garden fairies and we see that Carol has not posted on this blog for well over a week so we are garden fairies, we are going to save this blog once again from disappearing into the internet the way a leaf disappears in a compost bin and becomes something unrecognizable.
We are doing this even though we are on the brink, the cusp, the edge, the beginning of one of our busiest times in the garden… namely…
The Fall!
What do we have going on that we must attend to?
Well, dear readers, what do we not having going on to to attend to?
There are leaves to change. We are putting away the green paint and pulling out our reds, yellows, oranges, russets, rusts, browns, and even pinkish-reds. Then we have to cross-reference the list of colors we have with the various trees so we can get just right the color on each one. After all, if we turned the leaves of a Ginkgo tree red instead of yellow, for example, we honestly don’t know what Carol or anyone else would do.
That is if we get around to changing those leaves. The last few years, we have fallen behind and had just started to paint the Ginkgo leaves yellow when they all fell to the ground while still mostly green. Seedy and Soddy felt bad about messing them up that way, but Ol’ Rainbow Tanglefly said not to worry. Leaf drop happens.
Out in the vegetable garden, Granny ‘Gus’ Mc Garden has been patiently waiting for Carol to come out and pick the last of the peppers, and then clear off all the vegetable garden plants and then cover all the beds with chopped-up leaves. Granny can’t abide by a messy vegetable garden all winter. She says that just won’t do and will certainly slow her down come spring when it is time to plant the peas.
But while Granny’s fretting about that, Honoria and Hortense are putting up the “Do Not Disturb” signs in the flower borders because they don’t want anything cut down in those beds until spring. They said it disturbs the bees and other overwintering insects. However, they were happy to see that Carol did cut off the seedheads of the Northern sea oats because they said that they cannot control those seeds from scattering and self-sowing everywhere, so it was good to see them gone.
We are garden fairies, that is one less thing we have worry about.
On the patio, DeeMa Mae Flowerweaver reported that Carol took cuttings of the African blue basil and some of the houseplants, plus took the poinsettia inside, so we are taking that area off our “to-do and worry about list” for now.
But as Sweetpea MorningGlory noted, Carol still has some seedlings of hollyhocks, foxgloves, delphiniums, etc. that she started as an experiment that still need to be planted out. We are garden fairies, we hope she does that soon. And then there are all the pelargoniums she needs to put in the garage…
And we haven’t even thought about bulb-planting. Carol ordered a bunch of bulbs earlier this summer without any thought about who’s going to plant all of them. We are garden fairies. Our rule is if she ordered them, she must plant them!
Anyway, as you can see, we are garden fairies, we are busy, and we have just saved this blog from extinction once again. We’ll end this now because we have a meeting coming up to discuss who is going to get that poinsettia to bloom indoors. We haven’t tried that before, but could it be any harder than painting all the leaves?
We’ll ponder that while we paint the leaves.
Submitted by:
Violet Greenpea MayDreams, Chief Scribe and Committee Chair for the Committee to Get the Poinsettia to Re-bloom Before Christmas