Our high is suppose to be 36 today, but it is suppose to warm up into the low and mid 50's this weekend. I will be having hunters at my house so probably won't have a chance to get back out to the garden while it is that warm. I am way behind my normal garden cleanup and it has been so cool and humid with the frost staying on most of the morning so I haven't been too enthusiastic about getting out and getting it done. I might just give up for the year and hit it hard in the spring.

We're definitely done with our gardening over here. Down to high 20s so nothing can be done. Got big plans for spring though.

Our lows are starting to dip into the high 20s now too - and I saw some juncos under the bird feeder, always an indicator that winter is around the corner; but after a couple more days with highs in the 40s, we're supposed to have a week or so of dry weather with highs in the 50s... this is a pretty nice November, IMO!

I did leave off that now, I must start to trim and gather leaves for my rose garden but , to me, that is not gardening, it is a combination of heaven and hell.

Saw a few snowflakes today (actually more like those tiny snow pellets that the weather channel calls "gropple" or something like that). Off in the eastern UP they've had an accumulation of 13 or 14 inches in the last couple of days

Beautiful sunny day here, with a high temp around 61°F ! Warm enough to take off my sweatshirt, which made me realize it had been quite some time since my arms had seen the sun, LOL. And then I realized that it will probably be another 6 months or so before the temps get into the 60s again

Almost done with the garden cleanup, still hoping to get at least the worst of the weeds out of my perennial flower garden. My compost pile has been "turned," seed pods collected from the pole beans, the wisteria has been pruned a bit, my shady flower garden has been cleaned up, the garden has been mulched with grass clippings and leaves, and so on... I have peppers waiting to be cut up and frozen, zucchini waiting to be made into zucchini bread, hot peppers and garlic to be dehydrated... pretty soon I'll be able to inventory the seeds that I have left over and the seeds that I need to buy, and it won't be long until I start all over with starting seeds for the 2022 garden. Somewhere along the line I guess I'd better first think about Thanksgiving and Christmas

The snow has come today, I don't mind so much because it is great insulation and I didn't get all my plants mulched. I think it might seem like a long winter because the grey days that come with the snow already are giving me cabin fever and I've only been in one day..

Susie, I saw on the weather channel that there was quite a large "blue area" of snow over Minnesota... fortunately we just had rain, but it was accompanied by gale-force winds; a reminder that yesterday was the anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald going down in Lake Superior in 1975

They keep changing their mind about the amount that we are suppose to get but it is the wind that will make it nasty. It is a really wet snow. I was wandering around the house today wondering what I'm going to do all winter since I'm not real good at being out in the cold. What do you all do to keep busy until you can get out in the garden again?

Well, first I have to do the housecleaning that has been neglected during the gardening season...

Other than that, I like to read, and I have a wall quilt that I started last winter that still needs to be finished. Plus I have some birdhouse gourds that I grew a few years back that are still waiting for me to do something with... and a bunch of old photos that I want to scan into the computer...

I honestly don't have any trouble keeping busy in the winter, it really isn't that long until time to start some seeds for the next garden again! (this may have something to do with the fact that everything seems to take me at least twice as long to do as it once did...)

Finally finished cleaning up the veg garden yesterday - and had our first snow overnight

We got about 6 inches of wet snow altogether. I went out Saturday morning and shook some off of my smaller evergreens and lilacs which had not lost their leaves. They were all bent way over, some of them clear down to the ground and I was concerned that they would get permanently damaged. We had more snow and this morning they are bent down some but I can't work up any enthusiasm for doing it again and they aren't nearly as bad. the weatherman says it is suppose to get above freezing Tues. and 20 mph wind so hopefully they will shed some of the snow.

Ugh, not good to get that wet snow when the leaves are still on -- a couple of years ago we had a snowfall like that and it badly damaged my redbud tree, to the point where we ended up cutting it down; now we have sprouts coming up from the stump/roots, which I'm hoping to make into some sort of redbud shrub LOL

I have finished with covering the roses up North; by the grace of God, a neighbor, or less than one-half mile away a dude with oak trees always bags his leaves and there were 16, enough to cover the North rose bed.

I buried the roses up North this year as that generally increases survival rate, although I put a garden fabric over them as it makes clean-up in spring; right now I am at home, in the library, and one reason I used the fabric up there was I want to use the old car cover down here on the new roses (4 of which already went to the big rose garden in the sky) as it works far better than fabric.

I should have started with them today but I went to get my ankle worked on this morning and am just plain too damn lazy, though now I will be raking the yard, mowing, burying and covering roses in colder weather.
I have had worse as that is how real men do things, girly men wait for warm weather.

I think it's probably too late for anyone visiting this forum to wait for warmer weather (unless the job can wait until spring...) ! The temp is supposed to be in the high 40s here tomorrow, but cloudy - and the snow from a few days ago is gone - so I'll do a few more things outside. Nice to still be walking around on bare ground this time of year, even if the deer hunters would prefer to have "tracking snow."

I have had worse as that is how real men do things, girly men wait for warm weather. Good one @RpR


Our deer season is over and as far as I'm concerned they didn't get nearly enough of them. If they wanted to track them all they would have to do is come to my gardens. There is plenty of snow there and there are deep tracks all through my gardens and they've been digging down in some of my hosta and daylilies. The ground wasn't frozen before the snow and it is wet so they sink down and damage the crowns of plants when they step on them. I sprayed my evergreen small trees and shrubs with Liquid Fence and so far I haven't seen where they are eating on them so We've not been much above freezing since the snow so haven't lost much of the snow so not much of anything to do out there. I have been potting up some of the things I took cutting from that had rooted in water so am still doing some gardening. I'll have to take pictures in my plant room because it is already scary full. It's going to be an adventure finding room when it's time to start seeds.

I was listening to NPR, classical music station up here, and there weather forecast is a lot more nasty than that I can find on-line.
Now they are up not far from my North garden but down here is shows 32 tomorrow and up there they are talking mid-twenties.

Well it took me longer in the garden today than I thought and will not mow lawn till tomorrow, mostly just to chop up leaves (only good thing about very strong winds today was it blew most away) and will have to get more fabric for the roses , as I realized if I buried them, they are short, very short, I would not know where the heck they would be next spring.

In the past I have buried them with twine to show location and the twine tain't no where to be found in spring on most; even when I used to bury a BIG six foot rose, finding it was a crap shoot , often.

I cleaned the gardening stuff out of the garage (had a table set up to hold the bowls of tomatoes, piles of zucchini and cucumbers, etc. - better than having the fruit flies in the kitchen), swept the garage out, and now we have both vehicles back inside.

Our weather forecast is looking pretty darn good - no real precipitation (just a 35% chance of rain/snow showers on Monday) all the way through December 1st - looks like it might actually be a pretty short winter again...

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!

Thank you, Susie! I hope everyone had a safe and happy day today