I started looking at the results of our recent first freeze in yesterday's post, showing the beauty in the big leaves now dead.
We had our first freeze in the St. Louis area a few nights ago, which means that lots of tender plants get turned instantly ugly.
At least that's what the local garden centers all remind you, as most casual gardeners plant in spring and that's it for the year -- or that's how I perceive it. Of course fall is a great time to plant perennials, shrubs, trees, and bamboo, with the ground staying relatively warm for a while still, cooler temperatures and more rainfall (in theory).
Although the fall color has not yet peaked here, most of the trees are starting to do their thing, turning those amazing colors for a day or two or more if we're lucky and weather conditions are right.
This was a pretty poor year for most harvests in my garden. Early spring harvests were fantastic with kale and swiss chard that had overwintered, and the tomato production was acceptable -- everything else was a disappointment to me.
A short post on a busy day. Although we had our first freeze the other night, temperatures will be in the lower 60's F today so it's a good day to get more fall chores done outside.
Remember that first bamboo planter box I created for a friend's garden? Well, the plant that I gave him for that box is just not a "good one".
With a freeze expected last night I spent the last hour of yesterday's daylight digging up my tropical bananas. When I first started gardening I shunned these plants as I didn't like their ratty, shredded-leaf look.
After last year's experience with raking and hand pulling sunken leaves out of the pond for weeks, I decided that those who net over their ponds to prevent the leaves from actually entering the water were on to something.
This weekend I was faced with a long list of freezing-temps-are-coming chores to tackle in the garden. Rather than my usual approach of thinking about each of them and figuring out which were highest priority, then figuring the amount of effort involved in each before making a decision on where to start, I just chose the one I was most excited about.
Our August RV roadtrip was a wonderful vacation, although at times not as relaxing as we would have liked. Still, there was so much discovery and beauty on this trip that it has to be one of the top trips of our lives to date.
One of the most unique and vicious-looking plants I've been growing this year is Solanum atropurpureum, with common names of "Purple Devil" and "Malevolence" . You can see a hint here of why it has these names:
Broken bad land that is. As we took our last little exploratory hike the morning we were leaving Badlands National Park, I focused my view on the land itself. Without looking into it, I suppose that although this is very rugged terrain, part of the reason for the "Badlands" label is the ground.
It's been a few days since I last posted about our August roadtrip, but today it ends, as we leave Badlands National Park in South Dakota.
Yesterday I wrote about the first half of our visit to the zoo on Monday, and left you with a view of a resting giraffe.
As I mentioned earlier I had a day off Monday, and rather than spending the whole day working in the garden my wife and I decided to go to the zoo. The St. Louis zoo is one of the top zoos in the country, and I hadn't been there for at least five years, so I was looking forward to the visit.
This past weekend was three days long for me, and I tackled a few projects -- some that I knew about previously (bamboo rhizome pruning), but one that I hadn't planned on.
It's Columbus Day, which means a day off for me!
Just some quick observations made in the garden yesterday, starting with tomatoes.
Back to South Dakota for today's post, where I took a little trek out into the prairie that was 30' (9m) from the RV door -- it would have been closer but they kept it mowed back a bit around the edge of the campground. At first glance, standing here you might say this was "just grasses":
Remember a couple of weeks ago when I posted that I wasn't really feeling the love for the garden, and that I had no real desire to get out there because it was in a bit of a state? Well, it turns out that it only took a couple of little projects to change my attitude, and the first of them was my veggie beds.
That's how I feel when volunteers pop up in my garden, and in my beds there is no volunteer that is more reliable than cypress vine (Ipomoea quamoclit).
As I was doing some bamboo rhizome pruning in the rock-hard ground yesterday, I noticed something cool: pieces of a bee nest! (I almost called it "honeycomb" but I don't know if that's technically correct since this isn't from a honeybee hive.)
After being in the rocky hills of the South Dakota Badlands for a few hours, I was getting eager to see some green.
Remember the simple red bench I created last year? I still haven't found a permanent home for it in my garden, but recently I had an idea.
As you may know, I grow lots of different flowering vines. Annuals, cold-hardy perennials, tender perennials -- it's one of that last category that I want to look at today: Vigna caracalla.
When I was growing up, comic books were one of my main imagination triggers. I loved the Marvel comics (no DC for me!) and trips to the local drug or book stores so I could choose new issues were greatly anticipated.
As the interesting part of our August roadtrip vacation was coming to a close, we had a rare full day in the same camping spot -- no leaving during the day for the next destination! Enjoying the sunrise on this day that promised to be warmer than we had hoped for, we made our plans for the morning.
When I was just out of college, a coworker of mine who was not from Chicago but had gone to school there for a few years noticed that I, like other Chicagoans he knew, often tacked the phrase "or no?" onto the end of questions. For example: "Did you watch the Bears' game yesterday, or no?"
Our visit to Mount Rushmore was just a couple of hours long, but the unplanned detour had us arriving at our the final real destination of our trip a little later than planned: Badlands National Park in South Dakota.
I'm back to posts that detail our August roadtrip. So far we've been to the North Dakota badlands, Yellowstone, Grand Teton National Park, and Devils Tower. At the halfway-point of our two weeks, we're technically on the way back home -- but there's so much more to see!
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