This was an incredibly short season for me.. about 3-4 months as nothing was growing until practically June and we're slated to have frost tonight. So I'll have to live vicariously through everyone else's pictures for the winter months! The mountains here have a fresh layer of snow, the highest continuous road in the continental US has been shut down due to snow & ice, the elk are in rut, the leaves are changing, the geese are flying in all directions (they fly every which way, not just south, dumb birds), the spiders are invading the house.. yup, it's definitely autumn!

I don' t have a good picture of Octoberfest, so I'm linking Zuzu's magnificent picture.

Still hot here, but today is supposed to be the last really hot day. I spent the weekend in Colorado Springs where my daughter and I did the American Diabetes Tour de Cure bike race. I was hoping for cooler weather there, but noooo.
Still no rain here. we are so dry that I really can't keep up on watering. There's huge clouds north and south of me, but the pattern this year seems to be that storms split over the city. I am digging holes for the roses from Palatine that should arrive in late November. Three boxes of plants arrived from Santa Rosa today, which was a big surprise. I thought they were coming in April. Good thing I was home!
October is usually the most comfortable month here. We build fires outside in the fire pit almost nightly since the weather is cool and winds are lighter. It gets dark just at the right time this month, too.
The mums aren't big or colorful this year because of the drought. The asters are kind of dry looking too. The good thing is, the weeds don't come back once I pull them this time of year!

Temps have been playing around in the 80s here. Like Cindi, I couldn't really keep the roses watered enough until the temps dropped to the 90s a couple of weeks ago. Last Friday we had a soaker rain for two days. Light rain the first day, then heavier rain the second day. Everything perked up and is now putting on growth. This is normally the time of year when things start slowing down, but the night temps haven't dropped as low as they have in the past .... no freezing temps, yet.

I got my first load of wood tonight. Oh, joy. I'll be stacking wood tomorrow.

Smiles,
Lyn

Today's high should be around 60.. boss had frost on his windshield this morning but I didn't have any at home. But I have to get my potted stuff into the garage tonight (or in the ground, but just really don't feel good) as supposed to get down to 31 tonight. I've had my lowest water & electric bill yet.. haven't watered the yard in over 2 months as we've been getting the rains!! Plus 18"+ of mulch helps keep the moisture in...

Do you have soaker hoses or drip line under that mulch, Toni? I don't know how any moisture would get through 18" mulch. When I water my trees, I have to move the 4" mulch aside or the only thing that gets wet is mulch. I can dig in the ground and it is dry dry dry.
We've had 1/2" rain today so far. I forgot and left the drip line running all night long on one bed, but it needed it anyway.
The roses have such vibrant colors now that it's a bit cooler at night. Probably this is how they look for everyone else all the time! Pinks and oranges in particular are stunning today. I will try to get some photos....

Cindi - No soaker hoses. Don't need 'em when you're getting as much rain as we have been.. it's been a WONDERFUL year for rain and I'm greedy & wanna keep it ALL. MINE MINE MINE. And the mulch isn't compact yet. still really fluffy. Now next year I'll have to do something about it, but for right now, I'm lucky (which is good because this has been a crappy year for gardening for me. I've given up on trying to control the bindweed in the front.) Lolllll when I have to dig a hole, the ground isn't soggy.. it's a nice moist. Some of my agastaches are like 4-5' tall and they're only supposed to get like 18" tall. Even my climbing roses are actually climbing this year!!! Purple Splash is about 6' tall, but poor Harlequin.. it *would* be about 6' tall if the blooms weren't dragging the canes down. Very spindly canes and the blooms are way too heavy for them. But it's end of season, I know it. My silver maple's losing leaves, the sunburst honeylocust is bright yellow again and my spiderworts all nasty looking. Was a bad year for that plant.. I don't think my Sweet Kate bloomed once this year.

Toni ...

@KentPfeiffer wrote this about mulch in a thread where I was asking about mulching for drought:

KentPfeiffer said:It varies depending on a number of factors. But, in terms of retaining moisture, adding mulch pretty quickly results in diminishing returns. In other words, four inches of mulch is typically only slightly better at preventing moisture loss than two inches, for example. On the other hand, there's a nearly linear relationship between how deep mulch is and how much moisture (from rain or overhead watering) is prevented from reaching the soil surface at all , especially if the water comes in relatively small amounts at any given time. It's easily possible to make your soil drier by adding too much mulch. That's why you commonly see recommendations to limit mulch to a depth of two inches or so. Under "typical" conditions, that's deep enough to limit moisture loss to evaporation, but not so deep that it interferes with infiltration. The challenge is figuring out which variables you have that are not "typical", and what you need to do to adjust for them.

http://garden.org/thread/reply...

It really made me re-think how I mulched in my garden both for the drought and for winter.

I am just passing along a post that I found really interesting because I had never looked at the task of mulching in the way he described in his post.

Smiles,
Lyn

2" of mulch is nothing for here. If I had that bare minimum in my yard, nothing would survive my lack-of-watering & wacky freezes (tonight's our first hard freeze of the year.. got the notice on my phone a few hours ago). And seeing that I did manage to have some roses bloom this year, I believe, thanks to the mulch & rain, I'll just keep the gazillion tons I have. Besides, I do NOT feel like having to move it again.. once was enough! Basically, what I have is a mulch see with plants sticking out here & there. Some areas are thicker than others but I know I haven't lost anyone to the mulch other than they got buried in it & I didn't move the mulch in time (lazy me).

I agree ... moving mulch once is enough ... And I also agree that you know what works in your garden better than anyone else. It's all about those variables that Keith mentioned in his post.

I just had not thought the mulching task through as far as how there are more variables than just putting stuff down ....

Smiles,
Lyn

Today I'm planting my spring bulbs, mostly tulips. I think back with longing to my days in my other gardens, without gophers, when I could just dig a trench, pop the bulbs in, and cover them. Now everything but the daffodils has to go in a cage or a container. Much more work!

Zuzu ...

Karen, at my one and only local garden center, told me yesterday that if I planted a tulip bulb next to a daffodil bulb, the gophers would not bother the tulip bulb.

You might want to experiment.

Smiles,
Lyn

It's not true, unfortunately. I heard years ago that surrounding plants with daffodils would keep them safe, but it didn't work for me.

Dang ! Ever hopeful on my part. Oh, well. I happen to like daffys more than I do tulips ...

Zuzu .... do you have moles, too ?

Smiles,
Lyn

I occasionally have moles, but I pour a little Pine-Sol into their tunnels and they leave very quickly.

Thanks, Zuzu.

I've just done some more research and think I have a mole problem ... not a gopher problem. The mounds are different.

Smiles,
Lyn

Try the Pine-Sol. It works. It doesn't kill them, but they will move away.

The temps have dropped fairly quickly here on Long Island. And I am playing Beat The Clock. I have accomplished alot of last minute garden tasks in preparation for this coming winter - brrrr. I have spent much of my evening free time researching info about roses. I find it difficult to find evaluations of roses that do well in this climate with high humidity -- zone 7. Avoiding roses that are prone to blackspot is the biggest challenge. I read somewhere that horse manure may help with blackspot. I ordered a natural brew tea and applied it from this company:
http://www.ahavenbrand.com/pro...
Keeping my fingers crossed that it helps. I also added a few more roses to my Palatine order: Pirouette, Rainbow Niagara, Pink Enchantment, Golden Fairy Tale, Ebb Tide, Cream Veranda, Paradise & Koko Loco. OK, have to go now to do more shopping - lol. These roses are so addicting - they are like potato chips - you just can't have one! - Margie

I'm so excited for you! Pirouette is one of the roses I ordered from Palatine a few weeks ago. It sounds like a perfect short climber and I'm looking forward to growing it.

You probably should plant Rainbow Niagara and Pink Enchantment in the back of a bed. They get very, very big. My Rainbow Niagara is easily 7-8 feet tall. Incidentaly, it might be a new name for the Tropical Sunrise that was being discussed recently in another thread in this forum. Pink Enchantment is the new name for Souvenir de Baden-Baden, and it also grows quite big. Not as tall as Rainbow Niagara, but still about 5 feet tall and 4-5 feet wide. Paradise is no slouch either. It's about 4-5 feet tall and 4 feet wide. The rest are smaller and probably won't grow above 3 feet.

You can look forward to some wonderful colors!

Gertrude Jekyll considered horse manure a magic benefit to roses - give it a try!

I just wish my climbers would get that tall.. only Charles de Mills decided to grow that big and then I stupidly had to move him (but his thorns were EVIL & I had planted him in a bad spot) and he croaked where I put him. Stormy Night got to be about 2.5' this year, Leonardo da Vinci managed 3', Purple Splash was almost 6', Harlequin was only 3.5', and Orange Velvet got to be about 3' and definitely not climbing.. he stands more like a HT than a climber. Austrian Copper is acting a bit weird, had leaves only on the tips of his canes and definitely rambling. Theresa Bugnet, however, turned into a beautiful huge shrub.. about 6'wide and about 6.5' tall this year. I think a lot of it was lack of moisture this past winter.. that definitely hurt them.