Good morning, and the frost is on the vines. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Denver had its official first frost early Friday morning — about a week earlier than average. At the airport the official low was measured at 26°; in my neighborhood it barely froze — but 32° was enough to freeze the top layer of squash and cucumber vines. The tomatoes weren't damaged at all, nor were the nicotiana or other tender annuals.
October in Denver is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get, and can whipsaw between heat and cold with great rapidity. Blizzards can happen — as can highs in the 80s. Sometimes big snowfalls follow on the heels of balmy weather: on 10/2/69 it was 85°, on 10/3/69 and 10/4/69 it snowed 15". On October 15, 1984 the "Bronco's blizzard" occurred: the nation watched on Monday Night Football as 4" of snow coated the field by game's end — the total snowfall was over a foot, and the ski resorts rejoiced.
And then there's Halloween. Legend is that Denver usually has horrid weather on Halloween, but that's a matter of faulty memory: on Halloween 2001 the high was 79° — it was an extremely pleasant time taking Da Boys out trick or treating; but on Halloween 2002 the high was 19°with snow on the ground — Da Boys insisted on going out, but before we hit the end of the block they were ready to go home. Now I'm grateful that I no longer have to take Da Boys out trick or treating.
For the week ahead, the forecast is for weather in the middle: highs in the 50s and 60s, lows in the 30s. That's a little cool for early October, but not unusually so, and a good thing, as I have the next week off — vacation time I needed to use before the 24th anniversary of my employment by the Bossman (good lord — 24 years??!?) on November 1.
It's going to be a busy week as the majority of my bulbs have arrived. The bar fridge is stuffed with hyacinth bulbs for forcing, but there are also crocus, rock garden iris, daffodils, and species tulips and yes, more hyacinth, to be planted outside. I should have gotten at least some of them planted last week, but alas, I've been distracted playing with my new toy: getting the treadle sewing machine to run (success — kinda, still working at getting the tension correctly set), and watching on eBay to collect a complete set of attachments (almost complete — with lots of duplicates to re-sell over the winter). I have to tell you, the variety of attachments is fascinating: rufflers, tuckers, quilters, blind stitchers; it's enough to make me take up sewing again (I learned as a child) just so I can figure out all those fascinating attachments. I do have a small advantage in using a treadle machine, though. As I spin (well, I actually haven't used my spinning wheels in years) I have the knack already of treadling evenly while doing something else with my hands.
And the house is a goddamned disaster area. I need to finish moving furniture around, which entails emptying out and moving a 7 foot tall bookshelf, so I have stacks of books sitting around. After that the Mister can get the grow light installed in the front window. There are stacks of crap sitting at the other end of the living room that needs to be sorted between keep and send to ARC: the sorting and clearing must be done so we can find the mouse Caligula brought in and lost this morning. The Mister tried to grab the mouse — it was pretty beat up, but still lively enough to scoot under a pile of crap. Perhaps Caligula will find it again and store it with his bubble wrap and other toys in his lair (Caligula has a whole pile of stuff he's collected in one of those collapsible cat play cube).
And, as always, I have to bail out the cold storage space for storing tubers, bulbs and rhizomes, and for the final stage of forcing hyacinth. I did get the fuchsia indoors: I've clipped back the main plant, which will be stashed in cold storage. I dipped some of the clippings in rooting hormone, and then plunked them into a cleaned-out Marie Callender's cream pie container I converted into a mini-greenhouse by poking holes in the pie tin, filling it with potting soil and covering with the plastic dome that protected the pie. The cuttings seem pretty happy — now we'll see if any of them root.
Oh, and let's see: I still need to repot and get cuttings from the citronella geranium the neighbor gave me (I gave him tomato and zucchetta seedlings), empty out the living wreath form and bring in its deteriorating liner so I can figure out how to make a better one (I figure that will be a good project for learning to use some of those fascinating attachments on the treadle machine).
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?