Six on Saturday – 24/10/2020 -Valiant Efforts

Chris Mousseau

It’s the first Saturday of the second third of Autumn. The fall tree colours continue to be extraordinarily gorgeous this year all over Ontario – we must have had just the right temperature and moisture conditions. Although it’s been warmer than usual (there’s only been one light, patchy frost so far in my yard and garden), other weather conditions have been about normal – relatively hot one day (above 20 Celsius yesterday, maybe 9 today and around zero overnight) and showers off and on daily it seems. Hard to get those last fall garden tasks done! I’ll be dodging raindrops today to get tulips planted and leaves raked out of the front ditch, but first, it’s time for Six on Saturday – six things in the garden this week, hosted on WordPress by The Propagator.

Our honeybees are busy gathering a last bit of pollen and nectar to get them through the winter ahead. One of the reasons I let Greek Oregano proliferate is it keep flowering right until hard frost, providing food for quite a few pollinator species.
My downed Clematis tuteur! Three years ago we used maple saplings to create this eight foot tuteur to hold first pole beans then Clematis. High winds last week snapped it off at the base. Better now than mid summer!
The garlic I showed you two weeks ago is now nicely planted in this relocated raised bed. It used to be near the back of the property, but watering proved onerous so I moved it closer to the back of the house, next to a downspout and rain barrel and trough. I topped the soil with dead leaves and daylily flower stalks both to act as a mulch and to decompose and add organic matter to the bed. In seven months (!!!) I’ll plant peppers and herbs in the mulched soil, at the bottom of the raised bed.
An update on two veggies still growing. My one and only cucumber of the year, now about six inches long, is still getting bigger (I may need to protect it overnight..) while my one and only artichoke flower bud is slowly showing signs of opening…
A few perennials are still blooming thanks to the mild weather, including Blanketflower – Gaillardia. Interesting to note that as the nights get cooler and the days shorter, the flowers seem to get paler; other blooms in this clump have a bit of red in them, but not as much as earlier in the season.
This is a Preston lilac – Syringa x prestoniae – that only blooms in late spring. Except for this tiny bloom that for some reason thought it was time to burst now. Like the Gaillardia, the flower in spring is a much deeper lilac colour, not this almost white.

That’s my Six this week. I hope everyone has a great gardening weekend – stay safe!

26 Comments

  1. It’s great to see an artichoke again at this season! Same thing for the cucumber…Fingers crossed so that I don’t have any frost and that I can eat some more ( 3 on the climbing plant and a few flowers) but the temperatures are dropping …

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  3. The lilac is very pretty and I hope it has more flowers at the appropriate time. Enjoy eating the cucumber and artichoke!

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  7. Thanks for the hint of using Greek oregano for the pollinators. As you say, luckily the tuteur fell over at the end of the growing season and not earlier in the season.

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  8. As with your maple supports, hazel rods are the traditionally used supports here but, after a few years, they become very dry and brittle and leave you down all of a sudden!

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    1. Yes, that’s exactly what happened. If I use maple again (readily available and free on my property) I’ll feel like some tragic Greek figure, doomed to repeat the same mistake over and over. Yet it looks so good…

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  9. The raised bed looks cool, and great that you have it closer to you. My curiosity is piqued (?). Are the stones around it there for a reason or did you take photo before work was completed? I’m thinking it’s the former…

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    1. The stone is an attempt at decoration and defense – there are bulbs planted amongst them now, and I’ll plant veggies and herbs in the spring. Trying to discourage people from walking on the mulched parts. Or shovel (snow).

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  10. Only one cucumber? Well,ours were not much better. They were doing well, but then dried out a bit while we were away for evacuation, and . . . were never quite the same after that. I just did not water them like I should have.

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