End of the Season Work

Arctic Skipper Butterfly visiting the coneflowers

Red dahlias have succumbed to the frost now

Birds have eaten most of the sunflower seeds off the sunflowers now

The end of another growing season is here, no denying it. We had a very good long run of hot weather this summer, well into the end of September. I feel a little cheated actually. Fall is one of my favourite times of the year, but I feel that we went from the hot +29C weather into a very cold wet period and skipped over the warm sunny fall days/ pleasant cool nights phase.

Jack Frost must have suddenly realized that he had missed us altogether in August and September because he arrived with a vengeance on Wed. Sept  26/ early morning Thursday and plunged us into a chilling -6C! My poor flowers and tomatoes didn't know what had hit them!  The pansies and snapdragons held on bravely, continuing to bloom for a few more days, through a few more cold minus zero nights before they finally gave up, too.

Snapdragons are hardy and can survive frost down to -10C

Then we finally got our much needed rain! We had not had any precipitation to speak of since the end of July, almost 2 months! There was even a fire ban on here in our county because of the severe dryness, quite unusual for late September.

This past Wed. (Oct. 10) Jack threw some snow at us, just to remind us that he was in charge now and to give us a taste of what he had in store for the next number of months to come! :(   Luckily it was very little snow and it only stayed around for 2 or 3 days. Today the weather warmed up beautifully to (get this) +16 C! How's THAT for the 12 of October?!?  I have so much fall clean up left to do so it was a welcome surprise.

Simba chasing his first snowflakes on the deck

Today I did  quite a lot of digging, first my glad bulbs, then the red tuberous begonias and after that I dug up my dahlias.

Some of the glads were in the centres of 3 of my deck pots and the rest were in my stack stone flower bed in 2 separate clusters, one was Passo glads which are medium purple with dark purple throats, and the other was Viola Glads with are dark mauve with silver edges, both quite stunning!  I clipped off the stalks to about 3 inches above the bulbs and then put each set in its own labeled paper bag with some peat moss. They don't like to dry out during storage, but neither do they want to be too moist or they will go moldy.

Firebird Dahlias

The dahlias were in the flower beds and there were 3 large blackened clusters with a lot of fat healthy tubers underneath; 2 clusters are the red cactus dahlias which I have been growing and over-wintering for over 10 years(!) and one huge cluster of yellow and orange cactus dahlias called Firebird. (I have had those tubers for about 4 years now.)  I let the clusters dry for a while on the deck, then put them into large paper bags with peat moss, after labeling the bags carefully. Dahlias prefer to be kept a bit on the dry side,  (hence the paper bags), but not completely dried out. The peat moss allows me to add a bit of moisture over the winter if necessary.


The tuberous begonias were growing in a pot on the deck. I dug around in the soil and found one good sized tuber and one puny one but I will try and save them both. They went into a plastic ziplock bag with their original tags (red begonia).  I still have 3 yellow tuberous begonias in a half barrel in the yard which need to be rescued as well. I have successfully over-wintered them twice already so I hope to get lucky with them again next spring. :)

Pond has been drained , cleaned and refilled for winter

We netted the goldfish out of our pond last week and, to our surprise we collected a total of 27 fish, 11 medium to large and 16 little grey babies!  We had lost most of our 11 original goldfish to a Black Night Heron that kept coming around to snatch fish in early July. We had added 7 fish to our depleated stock in mid July, which we had received free of charge from the kind owner of Tail Creek Greenhouse. (Thank you, Judy! :) We were expecting only about 9 fish. As I scooped dead leaves out of the bottom of the pond, I kept find little wrigglers hiding in the debris. They are now safely situated in 2 tanks in the laundry room for the winter.


Next job:
1) Winterize Morden rose bushes

2)Dig out Canna lily from pot to overwinter

3) trim perennials in round angel bed

4) Collect Cosmos seeds