October Garden

October had a few surprises for me in the garden. Like more raspberries (WHAT?!). And the biggest dahlias bloom I've ever grown at over 10" wide. It's a Wynn's Moonlight Sonata in a peachy orange color.

I also had the biggest Belle of Barmera I've ever grown too - it was about 9" or so and the most beautiful shades of pink! 

There were figs from the fig tree until frost. 

The raspberries. We had multiple rounds of October raspberries. It was the strangest (and most wonderful!) thing. 

The morning glory bloomed on the trellis with pretty purple flowers. 

This was the garden at mid October: 

I cleaned out the green house, organized the piles of pots and tools. 

Towards the end of the month I began loading up the greenhouse with plants. The first ones in were the ones that prefer warmer weather. Then I started transferring herbs like rosemary and sage from the garden beds back to pots. I saved a lot less than last year. I decided I wanted more room for seeds, bulbs and that sort of thing in February than overwintering more plants. 

The garden is waning... but it's not over yet. A big hard freeze is coming soon (it's in the forecast for November 1st), but until my dahlias are nipped I'm going to enjoy more of this: 

Full House

I finished potting up the dahlias - just in time for spring. It's a full house in the greenhouse, I have dahlia starter pots squeezed into every nook and cranny. The shelves are full, the crates are being used as a second set of shelves. Even with the mass die-off of dahlias last summer, I think I have just as many as last year... just fewer varieties. 

Apricot desire died off completely last summer. Waltzing Matilda looked dead when I opened the bag (I still pre-started it, my purple Bishop's Children dahlia also looks totally dead every year and comes back, so you don't know until you try). Last year a few bulbs that looked perfectly healthy never sprouted when they were potted. 

I used every single saved plastic pot I had stored, plus 2 I had to borrow. I went through 2 of the big bags of potting mix. I crammed multiple bulbs into the same pot to get everything in dirt. 

It feels so good to be done! First day of Spring and exactly 6 weeks until May 1st... I'm ready! (Next up: ordering mulch and starting to mulch.)

Seed and Dahlia Starting

We've seen more snow in March this year than any other month this winter. The weather keeps waffling between this...

And this...

I'm over it. It's time for spring. 

I started my seeds in the greenhouse. Mostly flowers - lots of flowers - in early March. This past weekend I also started 8 tomatoes. I am only growing the tomatoes that everyone eats this year - 2 cherry tomatoes (sweet millions), 2 roma paste, 1 Tappy heritage, 1 early girl, 2 bushsteak hybrid). These were the best and most eaten tomatoes of last year and the most versatile for sauce. While I love the fancier heirlooms, I can't eat raw tomatoes anymore and they were a pain for sauce, so this year we are keeping things simple. I have the tomatoes and some snapdragons inside under the grow light, everything else is outside or headed out there after sprouting on the radiator. 

This year I'm having fun with flower seeds! Two kinds of snapdragons (rocket hybrid and tall deluxe) for the raised bed garden, some low ones for pots and the front yard (twinny apple blossom and seeds I collected from white-purple, yellow-pink and orange-pink varieties). Pink lemonade and Apricotta cosmos, blushing black eyed susan vine, sunflowers. Butterfly weed for the far back garden. Dahlias from seed I collected last fall. This year I'm experimenting with growing coleus from seed too - it's self-seeded so beautifully in my pots the past couple of summers, I feel like it's worth trying out. My homegrown marigolds last year were the only ones that didn't have blight, so I'm growing more of those as well. In combination with the flowers I've overwintered - I have a really great start this year to the garden beds and pots. I also started a few herbs from seed that did very well last year - sage, dill, chamomile. 

I've started potting up dahlia bulbs, one crate at a time. There are quite a few (even with the mass die-off), so I'm only about halfway at this point. I need the weather to warm up soon so we can take the heater out of here and have more room to stand. Space is at a premium in here this time of year. 

My next big to-do after pre-starting the dahlias is to order mulch, finish spring yard cleanup and begin spreading mulch around. April is going to be an even crazier month, so the earlier I can started the better (which scares me because March has been ridiculous and it's the calm before the storm). Hopefully the weather cooperates and we are finally done with the snow. 

Winter-ish Garden Planning for Spring

Like many parts of the US, winter here in Northern NJ has been unusually warm and oddly snow-free (tonight is supposed to be our first snow storm of the season!). Other than the battering ram of seasonal winter illnesses that have hit our family, I could have easily mistaken January and February for March and April. It's chilly and damp, it's mild and sunny, it's mild and rainy, the bulbs are coming up, the crocus is blooming across the backyard, the trees are budding way too early. We've had a few quick frigid blasts but they haven't lasted very long. Winter just hasn't been nearly as painful as other years. Even tonight's snow should melt quickly - it's expected to be almost 60 on Thursday. 

The greenhouse has been a wild ride. Too hot during a sunny warm spell hitting 90+. Too cold during a polar vortex. Mike brilliantly realized that an old wool rug from the basement (previously chewed up by a vengeful french bulldog on one side) is a fantastic greenhouse insulator on the roof during a brutal cold snap when the heater can't keep up with 7 degrees and 60 mph winds. The plants inside though are surviving, some are straggly but others doing surprisingly well. I have had little bouquets of snapdragons and geraniums on and off all winter. 

Spring and the garden are on my mind of course as February draws to a close. Things are busy and only going to ramp up... My year of "yes" has been catching up with me, for better and worse. Mostly for the better - it's been a year of new experiences, new places, more fun, more quality time, more people and projects and all the things we missed during COVID isolation. However as spring nears, a lot of my yeses are coming home to roost. And that's on top of our annual crazy of birthday season (most of our family birthdays are crammed together in May and June) and double sports for two kids. Did I mention I'm a double room parent and on the PTO board? This spring I'm also running my first fundraiser, chairing science day in two schools and helping to set up an outdoor classroom at Oliver's school. It's all amazing stuff... but it's also A LOT. I just might have overextended myself a bit this year. (Before anyone sends me helpful information on the "power of no" ...I wanted this. I like being involved in their schools, classes and interests. I like sharing my expertise. I want to support the boys' sports passions. Oliver also heads off to Middle School next year, so this is a last hurrah for me in this arena with him). 

Spring will be all about Prioritizing. 

I don't want to give up anything that's important to our family at home, like setting up the pool as early as possible. Luckily I think the heavy lift was done last year building the base and it's held up great all winter. It just needs some raking and a few bags of sand to level everything off before setup. After that it's just the regular pool maintenance. 

I also don't want to give up anything that's important to me, like the garden and flowers. It's a lot of prep work in the spring, but the outdoor oasis brings me so much joy. Our plan this year is to keep things as simple as possible. Minimal new challenges and do what has worked well previously. 

• Mulching early was a game changer last year, getting it out of the way in late March and early April before true schedule chaos hit. I plan to do the same this year if the weather allows. 
• I'll be seed starting in mid-March - the plants get leggy if I start my seeds too early. I'm pre-starting 8 tomatoes, flowers and a few herbs.  
• I want to try to get the dahlias potted up in mid March as well, so they have a good head start. I love that they bloom earlier this way. 
• The raised bed garden will be planted as soon as the weather and schedule allows in early May.
• Pots and the front yard flowers will be planted after the garden is done, with annuals and dahlias in early to mid-May. 
• The fundraiser I'm running is a native plant sale for the school, I admit I intend to buy a few native perennials to support a good cause and fill out key spots in our yard. 
• I will replace the thujas that died along the fence with either new thujas or something similar 

This is a low stakes, low maintenance year in the garden. The appeal of the native plants is that they should do fine on their own and work in parts of the yard I'm finding challenging. I also decided on no new/replacement dahlias, which was a hard decision - even though I really want to replace the dahlias I lost last year, I'm taking a gap year from purchasing any to see how things go this summer, the mites last year were brutal. And I still have a lot of bulbs in the basement. It's not like I'm going to have gaps that need filling! 

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. 

October Garden Wrap Up & Greenhouse

Whew! This has been A YEAR. I am relieved the season is over to be honest. The chipmunks, the white flies, the mildew and blights, the lantern flies, the spider mites... this year has been stressful with all the pests. I can't even compost most of the garden because it's all contaminated. And while most of these things will be restarted again next year from seed, I lost way too many dahlias this year... but at the same time I'm grateful I didn't lose them all. 

Tomatoes

The tomatoes are fully pulled up. Originally I pulled up the big tomatoes in September, but it was time to pick the last of the cherry tomatoes and pull up those plants plants. I left the borage and marigolds for the pollinators until we have a hard freeze. 

Thoughts for 2023: Plant 2 cherry tomatoes, 2 plum/paste, 2 bush steak hybrids, 2 early girls + borage and marigolds. These tomatoes did better than all the others hands down and were the most widely eaten by the family (and were easily made into small batch sauce when we had too many). 

Dahlias

The surviving dahlias bounced back and starting reblooming, all of them except Labyrinth (which took the most damage of the survivors). Apricot Desire didn't make it.  All the dahlias got frost burned during a 3 night cold snap, but it wasn't a killing frost as predicted. I'll pull them up once they are fully wiped out. Hopefully all of these come back next year and that the bulbs are strong enough to survive over-wintering. 

Thoughts for 2023: I need a replacement for Apricot Desire. And possibly Labyrinth if that one doesn't come back. 

Mixed Flowers

The mixed flowers this year were an ideal balance for bouquets. Half snapdragons the bed was, 2 cosmos, 3 rows of zinnias (2 coral + carnival mix). It was just the right balance of flowers for my bouquets. Even the random dark magenta celosia ended up growing well here. 

Thoughts for 2023: Move the globe amaranth to the corner so it can get more light. Plant one pink lemonade cosmos and one of those new apricotta cosmos that I'm seeing everywhere (it's coral and I WANT it). 

Vines

The nasturtiums took over this bed, as always, during August and September. Chard and carrots remain (they don't mind a nip of cold) and will be harvested at the end of the month/first frost so I can tuck this bed in for winter too. 

Thoughts for 2023:  I need to only plant one nasturtium here not two. They get so big! I say that every year and always forget in the spring. No other changes - the successes (melons, peas, nasturtiums, carrots, chard) and failures (cucumbers) here were pest related. 

Herbs and Strawberries

Herbs were top notch this year. Rosemary, sage and lavender were dug up and brought into the greenhouse for overwintering. The calendula self-seeded so it might come back on its own, and the oregano, thyme and strawberries definitely will. I'll restart the sage, calendula, dill, borage, and chamomile from seed in the late winter/early spring. The sunflowers were really pretty here as always. This bed will be tucked in with lots of leaves for insulation once we have a killing frost. 

Thoughts for 2023: Hopefully next year we'll have a better strawberry harvest with the new garden defenses in place against the chipmunks. There's nothing I would change here - this stellar herb harvest this is weather related, not effort or strategy related. 

Pots

The potted rosemary also went to the greenhouse, along with the brown turkey fig tree for overwintering. The lemon balm will come back next year in the pot on its own, I usually put it up against the house for protection and residual heat. We were happy with the hot pepper harvest, Mike made plenty of hot sauce. The potted herbs did great this year, just like the beds. The potted flowers were a mixed bag - the morning glory was a dud again this year.

Thoughts for 2023: Next year in the big aqua pot against the trellis, I have to pick a new vine. This is the second year in a row that the morning glory did terribly. I didn't even bloom! I could probably try one somewhere else (against the chain link fence perhaps?) but no more wasting pot space. 

Elsewhere in the Yard

One elderberry bush bloomed, one did not, before the deer came through. I knew both bushes have to bloom for cross-pollination, so I harvested the flowers instead. The birds ate all the blueberries before they ripened. The raspberry-loving bird (that I call "raspberry bird") ate some of our raspberries in July but had already flown South when the small random September/October harvest happened so we didn't have to share. The blackberries were tart this year from lack of rain but we had plenty and they made nice sorbet. The fig tree has had a decent harvest, but not as many as last year (the harvests are cyclical). 

Thoughts on 2023: Next year I'm adding deer netting to the back fence in hopes of keeping the greedy deer out of the yard and hopefully spare my poor elderberry bushes (and hostas!). The blueberry bushes need blueberry boxes, which is still on the "things to do" list. The citrus trees need a repotting in the spring. I also want to do mini pumpkins. Outside the garden though, because they attract those awful squash vine borers that hurt other vines like melons. So I'm including pumpkins here instead, they will be elsewhere in the yard.

Flowers Elsewhere 

While not part of the main garden, I want to note flowers for next year beyond dahlias. The dahlias were a struggle, but hopefully the mite issue won't be an annual thing and next year I'll be sure to do an early spray with neem oil. 

The flowers in my pots were a mixed bag. The same flowers in different pots were beautiful or terrible. I'm not really sure what happened unless there were insects or blight. The coleus that did the best was the one that sprang up from self-seeded seeds. This has inspired me to try growing it from seed next year. 

I REALLY liked what we did in the front yard this year, mixing snapdragons (including ones I started from seed), lantanas and dahlias across the front bushes. It was a great mix of colors and textures. The only thing I want to do differently is to note dalinova colors, something I never thought about before until I had 4 orange dalinovas in a row out front this year. I made sure to tag them before the frost so that I can put all of the orange into one bag, pink into another bag. None of my red or yellow survived overwintering I guess. 

The Greenhouse

Here's the greenhouse right now with what I decided to overwinter. It's mostly herbs and flowers. The geraniums had a rough summer so only a few were worth saving. There are lots of snapdragons (and that's not even all of them, just the little ones that fit in pots in colors I wanted to save). A few of the snapdragons are a little meh looking - I debated keeping them but decided to give them a chance to bounce back - they have surprised me in the past. Worst case I'll pull them up in the winter to make room for seeds and dahlias in late Feb. I also saved the lantanas from the front yard. It's an experiment. I really liked the colors and how big they grew this year, I'm hoping if I can overwinter them they'll have a head start next year. Two look terrible and one is fine, I think this is due to how I pulled them up (lessons learned for the future). 

The begonia bulbs have a reserved spot in the greenhouse, same as last year on a bottom shelf. They really like overwintering in dry dirt in the greenhouse and came back better than ever this year. 

So that's the garden right now and my big plans for next year. Or not so big, since I think I'll just be ordering a few seed packets and maybe a replacement dahlia (but maybe not... it might be smart to hold off and use what survived next year and see if the mites persist... I'd hate to re-invest only to lose more stock). I have a lot of cleanup work ahead of me to get everything ready for winter this November.