Get Into the Garden

Garden of weeden

As I continue on my path of fall celebration I'm tackling #10 Get Into Your Garden.  Sunday is typically my gardening day.  I weed, harvest and freeze any tomatoes or green beans that we're not going to be able to eat right away.  This past Sunday I ripped out a lot from the garden that's done producing leaving not a whole lot left except an eggplant plant, a few pepper plants, a fading tomato plant that still had a few green guys on it and of course, the kale.  My raised bed is a hot mess with weeds and dead plants.  I'm going to work on tilling it under and working in some compost.  I'm planning to pretty much just leave my other garden and have Evan put some mulched leaves on it when he starts mowing them.  I'm also going to make mental notes (actually I'll probably make another blog on that) about what I want to plant again next year and what I want to forget about.  Right now I can say I'm done with the watermelon and cantaloupe.  Two years of baseball sized
watermelons tells me
to give it up and the first year we got some really good cantaloupe but this year--not so much.

Just the tomato plant, peppers and the eggplant

The kale is still going strong, of course.

Daisies around the lamp post

As for my flower beds around the house, I've been tossing around an idea in my head about pulling out the geraniums I planted in the spring (TOTALLY going to do that again!  Really happy with those!) and planting some mums instead.  Here's the thing though.  I'm cheap.  I don't really want to spend a lot of money to plant plants that are only going to last a few months.  Plus, I'll be putting up Halloween decorations and I don't want to mix tasteful planted mums with my trashy halloween lights.  The mums will detract from my decorations.  But they're so pretty and such a great FALL plant.  They also remind me of my grandma.  Her birthday was in September and my mom used to get her a BIG mum for her front step.  Or maybe she only did it one year, but they still remind me of her.  I'm thinking about using mums in my monument to fall as well.  I was thinking about creating something down by my lamp post where there are currently a mound of yellow daisies.  I really love them, and it's so sweet how the kids pick them for me, "Here mom, I picked a flower for you!", they look great still and will for quite awhile, but daisies say SUMMER and I want to say FALL.  Maybe mums there instead of in the flower beds?  I'll have to check mum prices.  Have you found any good mum prices around?  I don't want anything too big, just a few smaller plants.

As much as I love getting ready to garden in the spring, I think I love tearing down just as much in the fall.  Nothing quite puts and end to summer than pulling out the summer plants and throwing leaves over them so they ground can heal for next year's planting.  Yeah for fall!

Geraniums where I'd put mums

More geraniums where I'd put mums.  Need to get the pink out and get some fall colors in!