Good morning, and winter is here. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
We're now in the dark-dark of the year, the 3 months from late November to late February and, right on time, Denver's first real winter storm arrived.
On Monday, November 18, the high was 64°; on Thursday, November 21, the high was 25° and the low was 12° — and it snowed. Not a lot of snow, but snow.
I made the first pot of chicken noodle soup of the season.
So now gardening turns inward. The Christmas cactus are well budded with the first blossoms just opening.
I have jasmine, gardenias, and geraniums blooming — and, surprisingly, one of the Inca Sun brugmansia clippings has established well enough, and is large enough, to have produced a bud! Time will tell if the plant is big enough to hold the bud to full bloom.
And I also have a rare confluence of work, gardening and knitting. A couple of months ago I attended an oral argument before the Colorado Court of Appeals (I needed to take notes to assist and transcribing the argument later). Colorado recently built a swanky new State Judicial Building which includes this custom carpet depicting the state flower, the columbine.
I took a photo with my camera because I had a niggling thought of using the carpet as the basis for a lace knitting pattern. I've since been learning how to do some alterations and simplifications with Photoshop, to give me a rough outline:
After I clean it up a little more, decide if I want to leave the center diamonds empty or put flowers in them like in the carpet, and calculate out how big of a motif I'll need to make, I'll lay a grid on top of it and figure out how to depict it in lace knitting.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?