Notes for October 30, 2009

Where to start? Who knows.  Most every fall, my gardening desires wanes (at least until I start receiving gardening catalogs around Christmas time).  This year it seems to be worse.  The thing that comes to my mind is that anyone over 40 knows that life changes and life doesn't always let you do the things you want to do and you do what you need to do.  I still feel guilty though.  I feel guilty I haven't written.  I feel guilty I haven't read your blogs and looked and commented about beautiful yards, your beautiful nature pictures and of course your silly dog (I've got one too).  I want to say I haven't had the time but whenever someone says that I always say "You would have the time, if it were important."  But when life changes as it does sometimes seasonally, you have to make do and somethings get pushed aside.  You find time enough to do other shorter/not involved things (unlike gardening) to keep your sanity, but I still feel guilty.  As I think of it, another factor is daylight.  One of my most productive gardening time periods is in the evening after dinner which diminishes as fall begins.  Saturdays and Sundays are usually filled with other activities as fall begins again.  This will probably change as my kids get old enough to leave the nest (one commuting to college and the other in High school).  And since I am the type of person that likes to do things the right way, I end up waiting until I have the time to do it right.  A specific change in the yearly schedule that happened this year happened back in June.  My mother had to have surgery and then she lived with us for a few weeks and that caused the priorities to shift and therefore time became lost for lower priorities and some things got put off.   I have had more gardening failures this year than successes.  I lost a bunch of perennials to the winter.  Some perennials that did survive became food for critters that also survived the winter (never seen chipmunks as often as I did this year).  I had ground hog take up residence under the concrete slab under my shed but I seem to have chased him off (for now).  We haven't had frost yet but it was cold enough in September that ALL my tomatoes died, BUT NOT my peppers.  It also was cold enough that all the Virginia Creeper that covers my back fence also died off.  I am usually picking tomatoes until Halloween. But not this year, I am still picking peppers (they have reached the point of diminishing returns and are getting smaller). I have an 8 year old stump that I wanted to dig up as a project but that didn't happen.  I did get a bunch of dead trees cut down and all the wood went to a friend of ours who uses wood burning stoves.  One of the trees had to be cut down by a tree company so it didn't come down on my holly tree, my neighbor's fence or my house.   In addition to the peppers, I still have carrots and radishes in the ground.  Not sure how the radishes are going to turn out, I think it got too warm for them for a little bit.  The carrots I am hoping to harvest Thanksgiving morning for pre dinner snacks.  That is the remaining garden experiment for this year.  I picked some on Thanksgiving last year but they weren't very sweet.  This year I planted a variety known for its sweetness (or so they say).  It has rained periodically lately but I probably should have watered a few times in late September and early October.  I also still have lima beans but I don't think they formed many pods and I should have watered.  I will definitely look at them and probably pull them when I next work outside to mulch my leaves.  I am starting to mulch/collect my leaves weekly as I do every fall up until about Thanksgiving.  We don't have leaf collection in my township and I don't have a place to dump them so I mulch them with the mower, bag them and put them in a compost pile to use as mulch in the spring.  With the loss of about 10 trees in the backyard over the last two years, there is considerably fewer leaves to mulch in the backyard.  Hopefully I will still get enough to have enough mulch in the spring.  The winter winds help me collect leaves from my neighbor across the street and one of my neighbors on the side.   We haven't seen the bluebirds since Spring.  We'll probably see them when its gets cold.  They come to my suet feeders during the winter.  Or at least they swoop down from the wire holding the feeders and get the pieces of suet that fall to the ground as other birds are eating.  I will be putting out the suet feeders soon.  I don't like to put the feeders out when its still above 60 degrees.   I got a new silo feeder for my thistle feed (for the goldfinches) and it is so cheaply made compared to the one I had for years.  I will probably look for a better one during the winter.  But in either case the silo feeders both collected moisture.  Does someone make a silo thistle feeder that has a screen bottom for drainage?   The box for my squirrel in the jar feeder needs to be replaced too.  Maybe this winter.  If the time presents itself and I have the materials...