September 6......... The summer seems to be over and I wonder if we will get very many more warm days. It's very early for frost, but some places have had some already!!! Not here yet thank goodness. I had my ususal depression at the end of August and managed to shake it off with a weekend away at a lovely Lodge in Port Sydney where our family reunion was held this year.

I have taken a good look at the road-side beds, and decided which plants I shall keep and which are to be moved or tossed. We had a look at shrubberies in the garden centers and decided upon some low growing juniper types. I have some large rocks that can be moved to the beds as added interest and now have to decide whether or not to widen the beds, or leave them the size they are. It will probably depend upon if I can manage to transplant two larger junipers from another bed.

September 10 ......... I've spent a few days grubbing out those beds and have been very discouraged at the state of the soil. Instead of putting anything in this fall, I am going to dig a trench down the middle of each bed and empty the compost bin. With a good layer of leaf mulch and the winter to let everything "cook", I should have a better planting bed by the spring. There are several things that I will keep where they are..... the german statice, hosta,pink shrub rose,baby poplar, peony and wild aster will stay though I might shift them around a bit. I have been looking at plantings around other people's homes to see what I find attractive and have found quite a variety of different ideas. Our garden center has some wonderful beds and plants and I have bought a good book that shows me how to prune things properly, so by the spring I should have a good idea of what I am going to do.

September 26........ Well, isn't it a fact that starting one thing generally leads to doing something else before the first thing is done???!!! In the midst of doing the roadside beds, I realised that I had nowhere to put some of the things that I was taking out of there, and planning to keep!! That meant doing another bed before I could finish the first one. There are several bulb plantings that I have moved to the second bed and they can stay in that one for now. I will be able to see the flowers from the dining room windows in the spring and they have more sun there so may come up earlier. That would be nice.

In the newest issue of "Plant and Garden" magazine, there are some recipes for Moth bags and sachets. This is especially good at this time of year when we are bringing all manner of hitchhikers in on our overwinter plants. Yes......I know we are supposed to inspect them for little outdoors creatures but .....do we always leave ourselves time??? The magazine is a Canadian publication and I am not sure if it is available in the States. It is one of two that I get each year and am happy with. The articles are short and to the point and timely. ........ Well..... off to the yard and some more digging!

September 30........We've had a couple of frosts this past week. Luckily they did not touch the ground......only roofs......so I have not lost any plants yet. We are generally a little later with frosts owing to the tempering effect of the lake. It is too early for cold weather as far as I am concerned. I am never ready for it.

The goldfinches are fluttering about the cosmos plants eating seeds. I also see that the poppies have got a few seed pods that could be picked and saved for next year's seed. I am surprised that they are still blooming so prolifically. It has been several years since I had poppies in the garden, and I had forgotten that they tend to bloom for a long time.

The trees are beginning to turn and when the leaves drop I will send them through the mulcher and pack them in bags until the ground freezes and I can spread them on the gardens.

October 5........ The big maple at the lake side has lost most of the leaves and thankfully they are still on the lawn and have not blown into the lake. It will only take a half hour or so to run over the area with the mower and collect the leaves for the mulcher........maybe tomorrow when I am home all day. Ahhhhhh.......procrastination !!!!!

I have dug out a whole flat of bulbs from the front bed and am just about to finish off the last corner. I shall have to plant all the bulbs and mark them with the colors when they bloom next spring, since I have no idea what bulbs they are. I know there are at least three different kinds of tulips and daffs. Maybe they would look lovely all mixed together ...... I'll keep you posted. I've left a baby poplar in the bed and transplanted a dark pink peony right next to it. That will give the bed a bit of color next year if it blooms.

A wonderful thing happened last night on the way home from work ...... I get home about 1:30 am ........what I at first thought were clouds turned out to be a lovely display of Northern Lights !! When I got home I stood on the deck for half an hour just watching the show. Pulsing waves of transparent pale green and red with spikes of the green over the whole sky and often meeting in the middle overhead. To make it even better there were also a few falling stars and just when I thought it couldn't get any better the wolves or coyotes started howling and sang up a storm for a few minutes. Just a marvelous night and I would have missed the whole thing if I worked a day shift !! It's a reminder that we should look up from time to time and that some of the best things are around us for the looking, if we only take a bit of time to notice.

October 8 ..... We've had a few snow flurries, though not the inches that some places have received. I am so thankful for that, since it would be just too depressing. I have managed to wrench my back a bit so any further digging is out of the question for a few days. It will give me a chance to catch up on some of the indoor crafts I am working on, perhaps. And just in case anyone is wondering ....... yes....the leaves are still on the ground.

October 13...... Yes it is Friday the 13th and I love them. They have turned out to be my luckiest days of the year. Too bad for me that they are so rare. Something good always happens on Friday 13th's, though probably something good happens every day and I just don't notice.

Yesterday morning, I finally got around to planting the bulbs that I dug from the roadside bed. Not as many as I dug since I had left them accessible to the chippies and they treated the flat as their own personal smorgasbord. They did, however leave a few mouthfuls of corn in payment for the bulbs. I don't think they ate too many in any case. So, I planted them in the bed under the dining room window, and I shall be able to see them in the spring, without having to go outside. They are in a semi-circle around a clump of carnations and if they look lovely in the spring, I may just leave them there for a couple of seasons. I have decided to start getting my film developed to a disc and then I shall be able to put a few pictures on my garden pages in "thumbnail" form for those who wish to see my garden.

October 15 ..... Yasterday was just beautiful, and I spent the whole of it in the garden finishing up some of the digging I had begun earlier. I have the roadside beds finished for this year at least, complete with a layer of leaves.

I did dig up one of the junipers from another bed and transplanted it to the roadside one. I had not intended to do that until the spring, but got carried away and instead of just cutting back the asters, as I had originally planned, I decided to dig most of them out and totally renovate that bed as well, so the juniper had to go. One of the branches was damaged, during the move, so I have stuck it in the earth on the other side of the path and will see if it will actually root there. Sometimes they do and sometimes not.

All that remains to be done now for the winter is finish off the bed I was working on yesterday,and pile leaves on top. I must also bring inside the tea plants that I bought earlier in the year and dry them for my mint teas. All of them did very well over the summer, and I am looking forward to trying some of the teas. I shall be putting the instructions and recipes on my "Teas" page. Providing, of course, that they turn out alright.

October 28...... Well the last of the dead stuff is cut down and Hubby will take it all to the dump next trip he takes. I will dig out the roots of most of it in the spring I think. Now that the roadside beds are looking so neat, it might be a nice thing to do the others as well.

During the clearing out, I discovered a single rose cane growing very near the white shrub rose. I wonder what that could be !!! It was hidden in amongst the stalks of delphinium. Now I shall have to wait til spring to see what it is. I don't believe I have ever had another rose in that bed and it certainly is not a shoot from the shrub rose. This will be very interesting!!!

I've cut and hung up the tea plants and the room smells lovely already. Now they just have to dry and I can see what sort of tea they make. The lemon grass got hit by frost before I could bring it in, but I see there are two new shoots coming from the bottom. That is good as the plant has a strong lemon scent.

December 11........ The plants I brought in for the winter are doing fine. The house is a little cool, and that is probably a good thing. I bought a lovely miniature cyclamen in the summer and it has been blooming steadily for the whole time. There are several colors, but the one I chose is white with a ruby throat. It smells like Lily-of-the-Valley and is a beautiful thing. The other colors did not have any scent at all.The red ones with a pot of white would make a really nice centerpiece for Christmas.

One of my plants has some of those little black flies in the soil. They have been flying around the house for a couple of weeks now. I am sure it is the rose that I recently potted. A friend gave me a stem with the most beautiful mauve multi-petaled flower. The name of it is "Angel Face" and it is the loveliest thing. Long after the blossom fell I kept it in the holder....a bad habit I have..... and one day noticed that the leaves had not dried up and that there seemed to be a root system developing at the bottom of the stem. I kept an eye on it for several months and when it had quite a healthy looking root system, I potted it and kept it in the same place that the bud vase had been. So far it seems to be doing alright and there are even a couple of buds fattening along the stem. I am anxious to see if it will grow true. I do hope so.

The African Violets like this time of year. Most of them are blooming and look pretty. I do not keep them under lights, but in the window that faces roughly west and the do fine there. It is a cool window and since it is behind the kitchen sink they get a fair amount of humidity.

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