Sept 21- Almost Autumn

The leaves are slowly turning color on the trees. I went for a walk along the trail to the beach today with Spirit , our dog and Lexy one of our cats.  I love the sound of the crunch of dry leaves under my runners and the twitter of the little chickadees in the tree branches. It was so quiet and peaceful! Not a soul was on the beach or on the water; no motors of boats and seadoos breaking the silence. Not one other human being on the shore as far as my eyes could see.

There were a few ducks bobbing around on the gentle waves, and our dog created a few ripples herself as she sat in the shallow water close to the shore. I sat at the picnic table there leaning my elbows on the top as I enjoyed the splendid view. Lexy sat under the picnic table in the shade patiently waiting for me to start back up the trail for home.

Buffalo Lake from Picnic Hill

It's September 21st and the temperature today reached 24 C! The rest of the week is supposed to be even hotter with +27 on Sunday! Not sure what's going on here with the weather. We have not had more than the tiniest skiff of a rain shower in the last 5 weeks!  The leaves are still mostly green and have only started turning color in a few spots. Maybe this unseasonable warm weather is confusing them into thinking it's not fall yet. (Technically the first day of fall isn't until Friday.)

 The lawn is turning brown in many places except for the part directly above the septic field. The flower beds are in constant need of watering. My Gardenia sprinkler is acting up and it doesn't want to ossilate anymore. It just sits there shooting sprays of water high in the air on the same spot.  I bought a new sprinkler in town this afternoon, a Yardworks this time and it ossilates just fine, but it hardly has any pressure at all and even on the 'large' setting it hardly wets very much.

Diligent husband checked all the hoses and settings and so on when he came home, but nothing seems to help. This Yardworks sprinkler is going back to the store. I knew I should have bought the one that is $10 more!

We are going away for a week to visit family in another province and I hate to leave my flower beds at Mother Nature's mercy. We have someone coming to feed the pets and water the tomato plants in the greenhouse, but when we planned this trip we weren't counting on anyone having to water the flower beds and veggie garden this late in September...  We usually have had a few frosts by now and most of the flowers would have been zapped. It's great to still have them looking so fabulous!

A male gold finch eating the seeds from the spent sunflowers

We have harvested most of the above ground veggies out of the garden, although there are still 6 tomato plants there ( as well as beets, carrots, potatoes and swiss chard.)  We harvested 7 little butternut squashes and 2 spaghetti squashes. Not a bad haul for a few seeds that I planted last March! :)

Happy fall clean up! :)

Fabulous New Greenhouse

Cedar frame and sides with polycarbonate panels

My new greenhouse is finished for the most part, thanks to my wonderful, diligent, talented husband, Chris!  There are no shelves or anything inside of it yet, and we still need to fashion a window to provide some relief from the heat. We hauled all 14 pots of tomatoes, big and small off the deck and they are happily sunning themselves in the greenhouse as we speak!

Smart husband put a big rain barrel under the garage down spout to collect the rain water there. It is quite full at this time and has provided watering cans full of warm rain water to nourish the hot tomatoes for 2 days now. I fill one of my big watering cans and it is enough for all the tomato pots in the greenhouse, so there’s not too much carrying of water involved, which is good. :)

The windows are made of polycarbonate, a 1/4 inch thick sturdy type of plastic made from recycled material with a 10 year guarantee which we got from a garden centre in Calgary, the Garden Retreat.  The lower part of the greenhouse frame is made of cedar logs which our generous neighbors, John and Christina  gave us. They were orginally half logs with dove tail ends salvaged from a cabin by  John and his father. Chris cut them straight into 4 by 4s with his saw and they add a fabulous smell to the inside of the greenhouse. The dimensions of my greenhouse are 8 by 10 feet, a perfect size.

My sweet husband is going to install an automatic system that works on the temperature to turn on the fan and open a window if it gets too hot, or turn on the heater if it gets too cold in the greenhouse. That’ll be great!  

I’m really looking forward to my very first greenhouse experience!  Next spring I will be able to start my tomato, squash and flower seedlings in there instead of cluttering up every surface in my living room, LOL!  It’ll be the perfect place to store bedding plants waiting to be planted out as well. 

We had a week of unseasonably hot weather for September and it got to be over 40C in the greenhouse. Had to water the poor overheated tomato plants twice a day. There are 15 pots of tomatoes in there which had been sunning themselves on our deck up until now. There are two types of beefsteak tomatoes, some Lemon Boy sweet yellow tomatoes and some Black Krim heirloom tomatoes. Two of these plants were store bought but the rest I started from seeds of tomatoes that we had eaten over the winter. For that reason I'm really pleased with how well they have grown. We have 6 more tomato plants growing in the garden. One is an Early Girl and it did get the earliest tomatoes which ripened first. Will definitely grow more Early Girls next year!

What am I going to do with all these tomatoes you might ask?  Well, we have had fried green tomatoes a couple times already and some of them have been ripening. They are so sweet straight off the vine! I will likely make some salsa and also give a lot of them away. Canning doesn't appeal to me, though. Seems too much like work! :)

Tomatoes, anyone?

September 1st, 2011 - Winding Down

Have been without internet service for over 10 days so this post is late in coming:

It’s September already! Where did the summer go?  Judging by the weather, which is fabulous, there’s still lots of summer left to experience. We are having hot sunny days with very little rain. That used to be the ‘normal’ summer weather here for the first number of summers, but in the last two summers we have had a LOT of rain, particularly this summer where we rarely went even 3 days without some kind of precipitation. 

We have however, been lucky out here at the south side of Buffalo Lake in that we have missed out on most of the hail! We did get a small amount twice, but my friend B in Red Deer had hail  8 or 10 times this summer alone!

Red Durango Marigolds

Some of my flower beds are no longer looking great, like my long bed where I clipped down all the maltese cross plants and the delphiniums to try and keep the reseeding to a minimum.  One lone little blanket flower at the far end of that bed is just starting to bloom. It doesn't get as much sun as the one in my round 'Angel bed'.  The sea lavender in my long bed still has a faint blur of tiny flowers on its tall stems to add a bit of color.  The lysemackia ‘creeping jenny’ has creeped its lime green tentacles  along the edges of that flower bed providing some great ground cover.

The tall false sunflower helianthus (or is it heliopsis, I’m never sure which to call it) in the middle of my round ‘Angel bed’ is still displaying a profusion of yellow multi-petaled blossoms.  

Arizona Sun Guillardia (blanket flower)

I cut back the monkshood and maltese crosses in that bed and the lilies are almost finished now. The Star gazer lilies are still looking fabulous!

Star Gazer lilies

The Arizona Sun guillardia (blanket flower) is full of beautiful sunny blooms and the annuals are looking great: gazanias, and lavataras especially. 

Gazanias

My cactus dahlias are impressively beautiful! There are 2 red ones, one in the angel bed, one in a pot on the deck. The most stunning one one though, is the orange/ yellow Firebird Dahlia in my old stack stone bed. 

Firebird Dahlias

In that stack stone bed the lavatara are looking great and the snapdragons started blooming again which adds a nice splash of color. The golden yellow Morden Sunrise rose is blooming in that bed for the third time this summer!  :)  

Speaking of rose bushes, on Aug. 31 we dug 2 small Manitoba Maple saplings out of my stack stone bed and I planted my “Love” hybrid tearose bush there. I hope that it likes its new home. It grew so fabulously well in the tiny pot which it was in all summer, providing me with 4 beautiful red and white roses. It is only a zone 4 rose bush, though, (and we are only Zone 3 here), so I will have to do an especially good job of providing winterizing protection to help it survive the cold winter weather we always get.

cactus dahlias

We planted the maple saplings in the wild brushy part of our acreage, behind the swing set.  (Many of the poplars there are dead or dying and we want to try and encourage more trees to grow to replace them. They provide privacy screening from the road, as well as dust collection from the dry gravel.)

Tall golden colored sunflowers have sprouted up in various beds, and some are gigantic! The biggest ones are in my new stack stone bed. I always try and imagine how those seeds came to be where they are, (since I didn’t plant them myself); It’s always a bit of a mystery. Most of the potted tomato plants on the deck also had sunflowers sprout in them so I know that those seeds must have originated in the Triple Mix soil bag. But who put them there??? I think it was one of the little rodents that live here in the environmental reserve around our yard...   

The rudbeckia are still fabulously gorgeous. The 'Autumn Colors' annuals are huge and the perennial Black eyed Susans are full of flowers this year. 

Rudbeckia "Autumn Colors"

 The echinacea coneflower that I planted 3 years ago are also finally blooming well. It takes about 3 years for them to really establish themselves, I understand. I had a few tries that didn’t make it, notably the ‘white swan’ variety of echinacea, but I have so many white shasta daisies that I don’t know why I tried to plant white coneflowers anyway... 

‘Nuff said!