Good morning, and brrrrrr. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Denver's weather has yo-yoed this week; highs have ranged from the 60s to the 30s, official lows going into the high 20s — in Denver proper, we've had frost on car windows, but until this morning, no killing frost.
But overnight, our first Arctic Express arrived, and this weekend promises to be cccold. When I got up this morning it was 19° and the forecast high may not break freezing.
It's an El Niño year — weird stuff can happen. Don't know if we'll have an October blizzard as we did in the El Niño year of 1997 — but it could happen.
This is really early for a blast of Arctic air — which means (thank gawd) that we won't be dipping into sub-zero temperatures. Yet.
But, in anticipation of the freeze, yesterday afternoon I went out and cut all the catnip (the catnip went wild with our wet summer weather), and now the pooties are having a high ol' time crawling over, under, around and through The Big Rock Catnip Mountain.
I've had the last week off, but didn't do a lot of work outside — it hadn't been quite cold enough! I have a lot of bulbs to plant of course, and dahlias and gladiolas to dig, but those are activities best left until after the first hard freeze.
Although I have successfully over-wintered dahlia tubers which have been dug before a hard frost kills the foliage, the tubers do much better if they stay in the ground until a week after a freeze — the cold sends the tubers into dormancy and "ripens" them so they are less susceptible to rot and prematurely sending out shoots.
Of course, the extremity of our flip from warm days and light (not hard) frost, to temperatures in the teens, may be a little too much; although it's likely that there's enough residual warmth in the ground to keep the tubers from freezing, still, I worry. The good news is that this is forecast to be just a couple of nights in the teens or low twenties, reverting back to warmer-lows tomorrow night.
The glads also had to be left until after a freeze — for one thing, I planted many of them so late many were still blooming. Glads are best dug after the flowers have fully faded and the leaves dry, or until a freeze kills off the foliage. Because I do have a few types of expensive "antique" glads, I tried using a Sharpie to write on the leaves to, hopefully, allow me to identify those particular varieties. We'll see if it works — that might also be a good trick for keeping track of which iris is which in the stretch between blooming and digging.
And, of course, a big shot of cold cooling the ground is ideal for planting spring-blooming, fall-planted bulbs. I often have problems with newly-planted bulbs sending out shoots when it's too warm in the fall. Although it's not a huge problem — the bulbs will still bloom in the spring — they are expending energy on those false shoots that I would much prefer going to the production of large showy flowers. The last of my bulb orders, from Old House Gardens, is on its way, so on Wednesday I'll be able to start planting bulbs.
Instead of working on the garden on my week off, I spent a large amount of time sorting through books and clothes and kitchenware and the various recesses of the house gathering stuff for the ARC pickup scheduled for Wednesday.
It is a large pile of stuff.
And there still are the backs of closets and storage cubbies I haven't gotten to.
And Our Old House generates a lot of dust. Ick.
The good news is I did get the giant bookcase moved, and cleared out enough shelf space to store the garage-sale china, and the maiden-auntie-provided crystal, on the glass doored bookshelf. I was able to move my knitting and gardening books from a small Ikea-type bookshelf to the main shelves, putting the small shelf in front of the front window to hold plants — shifting the treadle sewing machine to the space formerly occupied by the giant bookshelf.
I've also been working with the treadle machine, learning various and sundry things along the way. Last weekend I was fighting to get the top tension to adjust — I just couldn't get it to tighten far enough. With some digging online I found a parts list for my model machine (a Singer 115-1), which left me with the possibility that the tension mechanism was missing a part. Or not — it was hard to tell if it was a separate piece frozen in place inside another piece, if it was entirely missing, or if it was there but was supposed to be frozen in place. Some more digging led me to a parts chart for a different machine which had the same part number — but different pictures — which clearly showed that the part as fitting inside another part (so it wasn't missing!). Consultation with the Mister led to the conclusion that the part should not be locked in place inside its sleeve — so the Mister grabbed a needle-nose pliers and yanked it out from where it was stuck. After I cleaned it out, put it all together, and was able to rotate the newly-freed part a bit, I was able to tighten the tension to the proper level. Whoo-hoo!
My online adventures reaffirmed my long experience that you can learn a lot on the Internet — I stumbled across a British organization called Tools for Self Reliance which provides, among other things, people-powered sewing machines to African communities — and has a complete guide for refurbishing and servicing treadle sewing machines.
Is that cool or what?
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?