Good morning, and happy Fall! Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Denver started out the week with record-breaking high temperatures, hitting 96° on Sunday, and 94° on Monday.
We cooled down, and even got a bit of rain mid-week, but temperatures headed back up yesterday, and we're forecast to be 10° higher than normal for the next several days.
With the official change of season we're now in the uncertain period — some years we've gone well into November before getting a killing frost. Other years are like last year, with a fast plunge into the teens in early October, after a warm September.
So I really don't know how long this lovely display of wave petunias will continue cascading down my front garden wall.
Update [2010-9-25 9:30:10 by Frankenoid]: Please stop by and celebrate the life, and mourn the death, of claude's son.
But no matter what the weather, I do love the quality of light this time of year. The high glaring sun of mid-summer strips the garden of color and subtlety is washed away. In these early days of autumn, the softer, slanted rays of sunlight flatter the landscape.
Although few leaves have turned, the green of the trees is becoming more muted as longer, cooler nights shut down the production of chlorophyll. Like the altered quality of light, it's a subtle change. The past five and a half years of weekly photography for garden blogging have tuned my eyes to variances that previously had progressed unnoticed by me.
This weekend I need to work on getting outside potted plants prepared for moving indoors. I've repotted the jasmines, geranium and fuchsia. I'm hoping the last batch of buds on the Ecuadorian pink brugmansia have a chance to open before cold weather forces me to bring it indoors — the plant is now too large for me to keep growing over winter, so I'll let it go dormant and live in the basement during the winter. The two smaller brugs that have yet to achieve blooming size will stay upstairs under grow lights.
I've had a lot of difficulty with spider mites and fungus gnats on plants that go from outdoors to indoors, so this year I'm going to try using tobacco as a both a treatment and as a prophylactic — the brugs are the biggest problem as to spider mites, so I'll drench the foliage repeatedly with nicotine tea before bringing indoors. Then I'm going to buy a couple of packages of rolling tobacco to mix in with the top soil and see if that keeps the fungus gnats down.
I like autumn, except that it means that winter is just around the corner. I'd like winter a lot more if it lasted, say, a month, rather than three.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?