November

Hello November. I really hope this month is drier than October.

We are struggling with the drainage project because we had too much rain in October. The irony is not lost on me here, since the drains are supposed to help with the rain flooding... except when you get 6" of rain in just over a week and the project is half done so really you've just created 3 moats/bathtubs for the ridiculous amounts of water to sit in. Awesome times. We had to buy a water pump. I'll tell you more about that in another post. Mike looked like he'd been mud wrestling in our backyard... and being that wet and muddy in the cold is not fun. But we're on a real deadline now with winter coming and the ground freezing, so it has to be the priority.

That is why our window AC units are still in. Or at least what I'm telling the neighbors. And it's why the house is a disastrous mess. (Or at least what I'm telling myself....)

I've been helping with hauling loads of gravel, but I also have garden stuff to tackle. So much garden stuff. We had our first couple of hard freezes this week, which means it's time to rip up the last of the garden, dig up and store dahlia bulbs for winter, empty the annuals in the pots and do some cleanup in the flower beds (I like to leave some plants in for winter interest, but plants like hostas with their slimy leaves post-frost need to be cleaned up). I'm holding off on storing the outdoor furniture until December, but it will be on the to-do list soon enough.

All the plants I'm overwintering have been brought indoors. I use those pet pads to protect the floors from water leaks and they have served us well in the past few years.

It's a jungle in our playroom.  Mike counted 46 plants in our house now. It's a combination of houseplants from my sister (who moved to London), cleaning up and splitting succulents I already had, my new love of succulent bowls and a weakness for Trader Joe's plants. All our windows have some green in them now.

Halloween! We had such a good night. It rained all day and terrible storms overnight, but then there was a break all evening for trick-or-treating. Matt was Rubble from Paw Patrol and Oliver was Thanos from Marvel's Avengers. The kids gathered an obscene amount of candy. The weekend before we hit up our town's festivities as well - the trunk or treat, outdoor spooky movie and bonfire.

These were my last dahlias before we had a heavy frost/freeze here. They were so lovely I took a bunch of pictures. The dahlias and zinnias in the flower cutting garden this year have brought me so much joy this summer, it's made me realize I think I want to do two flower beds next year in the garden. One for dahlias (adding in a couple more varieties) and one for zinnias/snapdragons/other flowers. With the 5th bed for herbs and other non-rotating plants, it frees up more room for growing flowers.

I've done dahlias in the cutting garden before, but I lost most of them not understanding what dahlias needed at the time - it was the first couple years of gardening. Dahlias need a few simple things to keep coming back year after year and I was so busy learning about growing vegetables, I unintentionally let the dahlias languish. The few that survived I moved into the flower beds in the yard. Last summer I bought a few beautiful varieties (daisy duke, apricot desire, cornel bronze and duet - which was supposed to be belle of barmera, but the bulbs were mixed up from the supplier). Next year I want to add a few more varieties and do a full flower bed of dahlias so I can have a lot more bouquets like these.