A Killing Frost

 We have had five or more light frosts over the past month.  Temperatures in the high 30s, depending on the moisture in the air, can deliver a pretty good frost.  None of them had really touched the Dahlias until this morning.  It was 28F, four degrees below freezing, and it hit hard.  But the Dahlias are still beautiful in their death.

Here they are in their last moments of beauty.  As soon as the sun warms them they will wilt and be completely ruined.

There is a Bumble Bee in there too

Several Bumbles were still hanging on.  They will thaw out.

Parsley and Sage

An hour later, once the sun had defrosted everything, the blackened leaves and deflated blooms could not dodge the finality of frost.  It is time to cut them all back and dig them up.  The remaining bees were quite upset, dive bombing and head butting me.  But there is no use.  There is no food left there anyway.

I was really on the fence about digging these tubers.  I have no money in them at all.  It might be fun to start a whole new batch from seed next year.  But I've grown quite attached to some of them and since I have the ability to save them, what's a few more hours of work anyway?

I was sort of hoping that they had not formed tubers, but they had and they were very vigorous.  Any illusions I had had about just throwing them in a box of compost were dashed.  That would be some big boxes and a lot of compost!  Which means, if I want them now, I have to cut them down to a more manageable volume.

I was careful with digging them, choosing to spend more time with the water hose causing less breakage and loss.  There are some beautiful tubers here and wonderful eyes for next year's growth.  Some of them are tangled masses.  It is going to take some serious work cutting them apart.

But that can wait until tomorrow.

Over Wintering Pepper Plants

 There hasn't been much gardening going on.  This past week we got four inches of much needed rain which is almost twice as much rain as we got in August and September combined.  It was sort of difficult to adjust to rainy days.  If I wanted to run out and check something I had to stop and think about a jacket, appropriate shoes and an umbrella.  That hasn't happened in a loooong time.  Before the rain started, I spent three afternoons digging and washing Dahlia tubers.  They are stored away now, but I still have the single flowered ones in the ground.  I am tempted to dig them up. leave the dirt on them and just throw them in a box.  I doubt that will happen though.

We have had five significant frosts in October, but my Pepper plants were still going.  I love these Black Pearl plants so much, that even though I have plenty of seeds to start more in the spring, I want to experiment with saving these plants.  Peppers are perennial so if you have the right climate, they will just keep on going.  If you don't have the right climate, you can bring them in as house plants.  Or you can force them into dormancy like a Geranium.  Surprisingly, even though we have had a lot of cold nights in the forties, these plants were still really happy and holding on to their leaves.

To force them into dormancy, you are supposed to prune them back, remove all of the leaves, and repot them in fresh soil.  This is mainly to avoid bringing pests indoors with the plants.

The roots need to be rinsed of all old soil and the can be trimmed back to be more proportionate to what is left of the plant.

I put them in gallon pots with fresh soil, and now I have brought them indoors to the workshop where I am keeping my Coleus cuttings.  They need cool temperatures and normal daylight and will need to be watered occasionally.  Being near a sunny window should work fine. I'll let you know how it turns out.

I decided not to keep the Acapulco Pepper plants as I can start them from seeds, but I didn't want all of those Peppers to just go to waste.  Just in case I ever want to heat up some chili.  These babies are hot.  I tried one and sort of regretted it.  They are too hot for my taste.  

These are edible as long as they have been grown without pesticides (which these have) and carry a Scoville rating of 7,000-10,000 which is similar to a Jalapeno.  They are not known for their taste, but It might be fun to try them just for heat,  I threw them in the freezer just in case.

Planting Bulbs

It's bulb planting time again.  I did a detailed post about this back in 2023.  This year I planted all of the Daffodils bulbs that I dug up in early summer.  They were either in an inconvenient place, or the clump had gotten too dense and needed to be divided.  One batch was a double Daffodil that I got from TulipWorld.com and it didn't turn out to be what I ordered.  They stand behind their products, so they gave me a gift card in the amount of the mislabeled bulbs.  I used that to buy some Squill and more Snowdrops to add to my existing plantings.

I had planned to add these some time ago and I took photos of the bed in the spring so I would know where I wanted to add the bulbs and where there were already bulbs that I did not want to disturb.

Its so easy to forget where bulbs already are and how many you really need, so photos are important.

Lately I have seen a lot of digging in my landscape beds.  The squirrels are burying Hickory nuts, but they aren't the culprits.  Either a Opossum or Raccoon is sniffing around and finding Daffodil bulbs and digging around those then (of course) not eating anything, just leaving a mess.  Since I use fertilizer, and because freshly turned soil is also an invitation to snooping, I made sure to sprinkle granular Repels All over all of the disturbed soil.  When I've planted more expensive bulbs in years past I have even pinned hardware cloth over the area to really lock them out.  So far nothing has dug up the new plantings.

And today I started the long chore of lifting, cleaning, dividing and storing my Dahlia tubers.  It is way too big a job to do all at once.  I divide and trim them in the fall instead of the spring because otherwise I end up with way too much volume to store. Today I dug the Figaro Dahlias that I started from seed, one of my border height varieties (Binky), and then one of my easiest to replace varieties, Brown Sugar.  This gets me back in practice before I start on the ones that are really important to me.  I have at least two more afternoons to spend on them.  I limit myself to two or three hours at a time so I don't get tired and start taking shortcuts.  Plus I sort of enjoy it.  Tonight we have a frost advisory for the fourth time.  The Dahlias are shutting down but still look really goo.

Carrots

The weather is finally becoming more fall like and the only things I have left in the garden are Carrots and Dahlias.  It will still be a few more weeks before I will dig the Dahlias.  

The carrots have done exceptionally well this year.  They germinated well in the mild April weather and then thrived in the cool wet May.  I planted four varieties in containers and one variety in seed tape along the back of the strawberry cages where I previously had Parsnips.  With my shallow raised beds I have to choose my Carrot locations carefully.  They need deep, loose soil to grow long and straight.  I have been growing them in containers with potting mix for quite a few years now and get very good results.  But it was kind of nice to have some growing in the ground because the containers require dedicated watering.

I pulled Carrots from containers all summer to use in salads.  When the foliage started getting a little rough looking, as it does every August, I just cut it all back to about two inches to see what would happen.  It came back fresh and green and one container has started putting out flowers.  I've never had this happen and assume this is because I cut the foliage back and tricked the plant into thinking that it was the second year.

Nantes and/or Sugarsnax flowering like Queen Anne's Lace

These carrots had become next to impossible to pull one by one because they were so rooted in.  I dumped one container and was curious to see what the overall root systems looked like.  They had pretty much taken up the entire pot.  

That's a pretty strong secondary root situation!

I started breaking the soil away from the side and the carrots came out easily.

Rotild on the left and King Midas on the right

I cut the foliage off and rinsed the worst of the soil off and put them all in a plastic bag in the hydrator.  The less you handle them the longer they keep well.  I will probably end up cutting these, blanching and freezing them.  

The Carrot tape did very well despite infrequent watering.  The soil is pretty good here, but they are still pushing themselves up out of the ground.  The variety is YaYa, which is a sweet, Nantes type. I like the Nantes Carrots because of their blunt ends.

  I feel somehow that there is less waste if I know where to trim the root as opposed to a tapered "Imperator" type Carrot where you have to decide just how much of the root is useable.  But I still plant those too because I love pulling a long, slender Carrot.

Last year's Sugarsnax Carrots

The great thing about Carrots is that they get sweeter in cold weather.  I cannot leave them in containers over winter because they will freeze solid and turn to mush, but the Yaya Carrots in the ground can be left for quite awhile.  If I were to cover them deeply with straw or leaves to insulate the ground I might be digging them in the middle of winter and adding fresh, sweet carrots to my Crockpot meals.

The Weather is Changing

 For the past seven weeks at least we have had perfect warm, dry, sunny weather except for two rainy days and a couple of random showers.  It is going to be difficult to adjust to anything else.  Today is 82F and sunny and the overnight low is a moderate 59F.  Tomorrow is supposed to be area wide rain with accumulation of half an inch.  Then, the next two days will be cool and sunny and I'll bet we get frost advisories.  Our average first frost date is Oct 7th so this is right on schedule.

This means that today was the last day to deal with anything I want to be dry and frost free.  First order of business was to transplant all of my Coleus cuttings to see if I need to save any more from frost.  Some plants will withstand cool nights but Coleus is not one of them. 

The camera focus was a little off kilter but you can see that when I pulled these cuttings they had enough roots to bring undisturbed soil with them.  Perfect.  I ended up with a tray of 18 with a couple of spares set aside.

I was also experimenting with Marigold cuttings.  I am not going to try over wintering something as easy to start from seeds as Marigolds, but it is good to know that if I run short in the spring I can pinch my seedlings back, root the pinchings and double my inventory.  

Three of these had excellent roots and the rest had nearly none.  I transplanted the rooted ones for now in the interest of experimentation but I won't put too much time into them

Sweet Potatoes will spoil after the vines are killed by frost.  I got one grow bag dumped but then got distracted before I got to the second one.  Each of the five plants had one nice main tuber suitable for baking if I want.

I dumped the rest of the soil through a sifter and found some midsized ones that will work for frying.   All of these came from my own starts from last year's crop.

The Celosia won't survive the rain and frost.  We have had around three inches of rain over the last two months and I have not watered these even once.

These are on the third year of reseeding themselves.  As I was knocking the roots around to shake off the soil, I could feel the seeds raining down on my feet.  No wonder they reseed so well.  I have to add soil to this planter which will cover most of the seeds too deeply.  I plan to buy a packet of seeds and direct sow them in the spring.  Hopefully I can get a better mix of yellow and orange because the red has taken over.

Some of these Marigolds have already burned in the cool nights.  Not exactly frost, but not happy.  Again, we're really dry and they have been on their own.

They don't look bad today. but they are nicer to pull now that they will be after rain and frost.

This planter of five Coleus has done so well.  You can see that they are faded and dropping leaves.  That isn't because of lack of water.  I have watered them all along.  It is the cool nights (we had low 40s the second half of August) that has made them unhappy. So out they go.

That leaves me with Dahlias, which need a frost to cue them into dormancy, carrots which are sweeter after a frost and one grow bag of Sweet Potatoes.  I also have my ornamental pepper plants that I will bring indoors on the cold nights and otherwise let them try for as long as they can.

Then its Leaf Season....

A Sinking Feeling

 Back in May we cleaned out two old Whiskey Barrel planters and replaced them with poly resin containers that look like terracotta.  I promise they look more like real terracotta from the side.  They look pretty cheesy and orange on the inside.  Anyway... look how much the soil has sunk.  I need to add at least four inches of soil, maybe six inches.  But I am waiting for spring.  The Hostas are rooted in and growing well.  I don't want to disturb them going into winter.  I will cut them back and add a layer of shredded leaves on top to insulate them.  This Hosta variety is supposedly hardy to temperatures down to -30F.  When planting perennials in containers you should choose varieties hardy two zones lower than your own and we are currently a zone 6b.

We had volunteer Petunias in them all summer.  Next year I will plant colorful annuals in them and use the Hosta for centerpiece plant.

Dahlia Photography

It is still Dahlia season, and because all of the big gardening jobs are done now but the weather continues to be warm, dry and sunny, when I putter around out there I get to spend time enjoying the Dahlias and taking pictures that will get me through the long winter months.  I still have a few small chores like planting the daffodil bulbs that I dug to relocate this spring.  And I am placing wire cloches over the perennials that are evergreen through the winter.  I have Primrose, Heuchera and Penstemon that will keep their leaves and must be protected from the rabbits and deer.  The other annuals are looking tired and I'm pulling them out, but the Dahlias are at their prime.  I still have several plants that have not bloomed.

Summer's End Dahlia

Only the second bloom for Peaches n' Dreams

Ice Tea Dahlia

Bloomquist Pleasing Dahlia

Beautiful from any angle

Bloomquist Pleasing Dahlia

Bloomquist Pleasing Dahlia

Bloomquist Pleasing Dahlia

Mai Tai Dahlia
looking like a pinwheel

Cornell Bronze Dahlia

Ice Tea Dahlia

Bloomquist Gordon

City Lights Border Dahlia

Happy Daze

Happy Daze is one of my Bee's Choice crosses with Junkyard Dog.  It opened red and yellow then faded to pink.  And the collar petals turned in a way I've never seen.  

The bees absolutely love it

Even the back.

My one and only Bee's Choice in orange.

HS Date Lookalike

Every morning these Dahlias are just covered in bees.  For a few weeks they were working on the wild golden rod and asters but now they have developed a taste for color!

Cosmic Pink

Cherubino Lookalike

This lavender Dahlia's is unique in that the petals stay turned into a cup shape from beginning to end.

My Summer Lovin' Dahlia attracted a Viceroy Butterfly this morning.  Every time a honey bee approached the Butterfly would flutter its wings to scare off the bee, but this one was determined,