The November-December Hustle

Oh the late Fall Hustle. My yardwork to-do list goes from a relaxed "not much else we can do until the frost..." to "OMG WE HAVE SO MUCH TO DO BEFORE WINTER SETS IN" way too quickly. I went from slowly pulling up the garden bit by bit to feeling like everything is urgent in the Nov-Dec hustle. There's no snow in the forecast - yet - but we've run into some hurdles and setbacks that have eaten into our yardwork time. There have been years where very little cleanup gets done and we have to wait until spring, I know it's not the end of the world, but I much prefer putting the gardens and yard to bed with a blank slate ready for the good stuff in the spring when the weather warms up. 

Top of the list - I pulled up my dahlia bulbs. They are all tagged, bagged and put to bed in their crates in the basement crawl space (this spot has the best conditions for overwinter the bulbs). I have one less crate of dahlias this winter thanks to the mass die off... but I could zero crates right now so I'm very grateful the dahlias had a recovery period. Hopefully everything survives the winter. 

While I was digging up the dahlias this big girl climbed into my hair, made me scream like a girl in a horror movie, and gave me the shivers for the rest of the day (she was like 8 inches long!). I promise she was completely uninjured by the panicked removal from my head and I left her snug in the snapdragons that week. 

The weather was so confusing in November - cold, warm in the 70s, cold, hot in the 80s, cold, then frozen like January. A little bit of time in the 50s where we should be, then back to January. The flowers were all mixed up - roses were losing leaves and blooming, the quince bloomed a bit. And then everything was decimated from multiple hard freezes. 

This was the last bunch of flowers from the garden before the big deep freeze. So beautiful. 

Yard cleanup began in earnest after the cold snap. The front yard is done. I literally cleaned up the plants and put out Christmas lights the same day after Thanksgiving. 

The garden in the way back has been put to bed... sort of. Everything in the rotating beds is pulled up, but I ran out of weed blocking fabric. I thought I had more but I can't find it, and the place I bought it from is half the price of the big box stores, local nurseries and Amazon. It's far away though, so I'm not going to make a trip until spring. But I also just can't justify the cost difference to myself, so we'll wait until spring. Two beds are ready to go, the other two have weird layers of this year's old fabric down to cover the holes. It's not pretty, it's not "ready for spring" the way I like to leave it... but it will work for now and block early spring weeds. 

What's left... cleanup of the backyard garden beds everywhere else. Wrap the fig tree. Put away the last of the furniture and finish covering the rest. 

Also we have some issues to deal with. SIGH. 

3 thuja bushes died this fall along the fence. I'm sad because they have been awesome for privacy and greenery. We think they actually died over the summer in the drought and they just lost their color this fall. I didn't water these as much as I should have because they used to have really wet roots before we put in the backyard drainage. Hopefully it's not a disease. We want to cut them down soon and replace in the spring. 

The obelisk I made for the honeysuckle broke. It's hard to see in the photo but, the only thing holding it together at this point is the vine it's supposed to be supporting! We need to get on a ladder and try to fix it before the weight of the snow topples and destroys the whole thing. 

The greenhouse roof started leaking. The more we tried to fix it, the worse it got, and water + electrical just seems like a really bad idea to me. But the plants will not survive January without a nighttime heater. We bought a big piece of clear plastic that won't block the light much (the ceiling bubble wrap blocks more) but will keep the water out. Inside it was time to replace the old outdoor extension cord while we were at it. 

Unfortunately we tried to fix the green house the "right" way long before we resigned to the plastic cover (since the plastic won't work in the spring/summer/fall when we need to vent the heat through the ceiling window and the leak is ridiculously bad now). This is a project we'll have to revisit in the spring.

Now that it's December and we still have a bunch of things to do... we'll see how much gets done before the snow. Mixed in with the holiday season and everything we have going on, the hustle feels a little overwhelming... but we'll just take it one step at a time and the rest can wait until spring.