Frost Warnings

Yes, I know this is Wisconsin and yes, having frost in September is no big surprise, but I'm Not Ready.  There, that should put a stop to this nonsense of Frost Warnings.  In my mixed-up mind, the calendar should be on August's page.  In fact, it took me until two days ago to turn mine to September because I am in Denial.

 This is the view out of my (in need of being washed) kitchen window this morning.  Oh, I hate to see all those flowers turned into mush mummies.

But there's no denying the annuals are looking a bit tired, too, despite my deadheading efforts.  Still, it's color and I want to cling to it!  We had such a ridiculously late Spring this year with that 17" snowfall in April and I guess I expected Mother Nature to make up for it by gracing us with a ridiculously late Fall.

Ok, so Mother Nature is not being nice to anyone this year, with extremes in every part of the country from floods, horrendous heat, droughts, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, so I'll hush up now since my biggest gripe right now is merely impending frost.  It's normal for this time of year, but just a tad too early for me.

I had all these good intentions of making cuttings of the coleus and some other things, like the sweet potato vines, to grow them on over winter, along with some geraniums and this and that, but I haven't rooted anything yet.   And we all know what happens to coleus the minute the thermometer dips down below 32.  And tomatoes, I have 15 plants out back and just had my first canning session last Saturday.  There are still loads of green tomatoes out there and I'll cover them and hope for the best because I want to make more sauce.  But we're supposedly going no lower than 36 degrees tonight (and 34 on Thursday night) so maybe we'll get lucky?  Oh, you're right, I won't hold my breath.  That's what got me hooked up to a Sleep Apnea machine.

Did any of you ever grow this pepper?  I started the 'Sangria' from seed this spring and it is producing hundreds of little one inch long peppers that are now in two different colors at once as they ripen.  I also have 'Explosive Embers' with the black foliage, shown below.

I'm not much for spicy foods; my taste in peppers is more to the mild Green Bell persuasion, but one day I was weeding right by ol' Explosive here, and thought I'd try one straight off the vine.  Wow.  When they say Explosive, they mean it!  At first, it wasn't bad at all, but in under a minute, my eyes were watering and I was staggering around the yard trying to find my way to the house for a glass of milk.  Like embers, the afterglow was a long time leaving me, too.  Very aptly named plant!  (I know, I'm a wimp, many of you could probably eat extremely hot peppers as a snack, like peanuts, but not this ol' gal.)  I'll still grow these two peppers just for their ornamental value, but from now on, I just won't be eating them anymore.

We had what will probably be our last scheduled garden walk of the season last night.  A garden club from the Fox Valley came out here for a tour.   Since all of the ladies were gardeners, they were really enthused about plants and it was so much fun to compare notes on what worked for them this year.  Many (or most?) of them were also Master Gardeners, too, and I didn't even get as tongue-tied as I usually do in their presence, they put Amateur Gardener Me at ease. We had a wonderful time strolling around in the rather chilly garden and the timing was perfect.  They had originally intended to come over at 7PM, but decided to come a bit earlier since the light is really dwindling by then.  We ended the evening in the house talking about stained glass lamps.  They were such friendly guests; I hated to see them leave and to also realize this is the last hurrah of the gardening season. 

If I'm going to protect all of these annuals, I'm going to need an epic amount of bedsheets and blankets.  I hate to let the 'Fresh Look' celosia die because it's just glowing right now in front of the house and down by the dome in the Formal Garden.  And the castor beans just reached some impressive heights, too....and I'm not sure if the seed will be ripe enough to harvest:

I planted over 100 seeds this spring and about 50 of them survived.  These are the 'blue' castor beans that I've saved seeds from for two years now.  I'm not sure how I'm going to cover even one of the 6' tall plants, but I'll give it a try.

The datura metel, or Angel's Trumpet Ballerina has finally started to blossom in the last week, but the plant is over 3' tall and once again, to cover it will be a challenge. 

This flower is huge, I wish I had a ruler to show the size here, but it's in excess of six inches long.

The waterlilies are still throwing a few flowers here and there, too, but all too soon they will be brown and crispy.  The water level has been steadily receding, too, since we have not had much rain for the last few months. 

The grasses are in their glory right now, lighting up at sunset even with the hazy sky conditions.  Yesterday morning I woke up in a panic, I could smell smoke and didn't know where it was coming from. After checking over everything on our property, I realized the wind was out of the west, so I thought there must be a big fire in that direction somewhere.  I was almost ready to get in my car and head out to see what was burning down when Ann called me.

"Did you hear about the fire in Minnesota?" she asked.  "That's where the smell of smoke is coming from."

Well, good thing Ann called me or I would have been driving a REALLY long way to find the source of the smell.  (It would help if I would spend some time watching the news, too.)  For awhile we had some very hazy conditions here, and it was amazing to think the smoke was all the way from Minnesota, a few hundred miles away.  I can't imagine what it must be like to live nearby to this fire, and thought again of all the people in Texas and other fire-ravaged states, too. 

I guess even though I'm trying to cling to Summer, it's evident my calendar is correct.  It does look like Fall.

Dang, I want to protect those petunias from the frost threat, too...the long range forecast shows that if we can get through Wednesday and Thursday's cold, the next week would be warmer and we still have a wedding coming here on October 1.

I'll have to get a coat for the White Lady too, and a blanket for her carpet of Bubblegum petunias she tended so well with that watering jug of hers.

By tomorrow morning, my yard is going to resemble an explosion at a rummage sale, with blankets, sheets, fabric and clothing strewn all over the place.  I'll post a picture of the colorful coverage for Fertilizer Friday hopefully.  And hopefully, the coverings will work.

Update on the Round House/Ruin Thing......my heartfelt thanks to everyone for their wonderful encouragement to the two of us on this project!  We haven't mortared anything since Sunday because we realized we'd better get some sort of a plan on the drawing board before we mortar too much and end up having to tear some stone out, horrors!  Carl had plans all drawn up on his laptop, but for some reason, Technical Difficulties arose and he lost all of his work, so he had to start over.  That took most of Monday night.  

Did I ever tell you Carl is up for work every day by 5AM?   All too often we don't get in the house at night much before dark, so his days are VERY long, so when he sat down to work on his computer Monday night, he fell asleep.  He falls asleep very easily, since his tendency is to be a Night Owl but his work schedule is Early Bird.  I worry about him more than he knows.  

Someone asked me when do I find the time to blog?  Well, I am a true Night Owl and write most of my blog postings late at night when the house is nice and quiet and everyone else is in bed.  I've found the older I get, I just cannot concentrate on writing when the television is blaring or even if a radio is playing.  I have to have Complete Silence.  (I know, I'm weird.)  And I don't like to write when my family is home, either, since that is precious time, too.  That's why I resort to late at night blogging and early morning, though many times I finish editing a post here and there throughout the day. 

I love to write.  Duh.  No surprises there for those of you who wade through my ridiculously long posts, huh?  (I didn't say I was good at it, I just love it.)  And another fact that may (or may not) surprise you, is I have been depressed for most of my life and am, believe it or not, rather introverted in many situations.  Yes, you heard it here, I am not a Party Gal by any means, I'm not the chick with the lampshade on my head (stained glass is too heavy for such shenanigans) and I've been told more than once I am funnier in print than I am in person.  

I had corresponded with a fellow gardener from Alabama for a few years who finally came to visit us awhile back and he said he was amazed by two things:  The garden was better than he expected, but I was not....... 

what he expected.  I had to stifle a guffaw when he said that; but I know what he means.  I spend a great deal of my life in the solitary pursuit of gardening and walking and writing (I've kept private journals for years) and was basically an only child so I guess I'm a rather Odd Specimen.  

The Great Depression (as it relates to my life, lol) was a not-so-good time for me and stemmed from a childhood fraught with some very rough times and from a thyroid that decided to take a hike in my early 30's.  When Joel was born,  I went through a post-partum depression that was horrible, for lack of a better word, but pulled myself up by my bootstraps and survived.  But eventually I ran out of bootstraps and had to get some help from a crisis center.  Believe it or not, a psychiatrist diagnosed my thyroid troubles and saved my life.  My general practitioner just wasn't hearing me at the time, 'Oh, you're a young mother, lack of sleep, stress, blah, blah, blah, it's to be expected you'll be blue, you'll get over it, yadayadayada.'  And here it is, 25 years since Joel was born and I can't afford shrinks and the search for a good GP is still on, too.  But I have an appointment in a few weeks with a new one, let's stay optimistic, shall we?

But anyway, back to the writing.  I bought a Smith Corona typewriter out of the Sears catalog back in 1968 when I was ten years old.  I had saved up my money from farm chores to buy the thing; I think it was around fifty bucks.   The day it arrived UPS, I was on a hay wagon up in the barn, unloading hay onto an elevator which was headed up to my father in the mow.  I couldn't wait to get that load of hay off the wagon and get to the house to open my box.  I put too many bales on the elevator in my haste and received a good yelling at, so I had to slow down so my father could keep up.  But of course, we had to go back out to the field to bale more hay, and then we had cows to milk, so my typewriter sat in it's box waiting for me to open it until dark.  

I finished my part of the chores in record time, leaving Mom and Dad to finish theirs, and foregoing my usual evening bike ride, dashed to the house to open the box in private.  What a moment it was to carefully open the box and find, in my hands, the coveted typewriter.  We had a very old typewriter someone had given to my aunt years and years before, and I had played with it since I was little  (probably why it didn't work?) so this was a dream come true.  I carefully took the tiny aqua-blue plastic typewriter out of the box and rolled a sheet of paper into it.  I struck the 'K' key (for Karen, of course, what else would I type first?) and was mesmerized to see the word appear on the paper.  Then I set about typing my first sentences.  

And then I was dismayed, again.  Seems somewhere along the line, I neglected to learn how to type.  This wasn't as easy as it looked.  Gosh, on TV and at school, secretaries would be sitting at their desks busily tapping away on the keys without looking at them.  Who knew typing wasn't easy?  And the typewriter was far from fantastic, the letters came out rather railroad-tracky, a bit up and down and the type face was 'Elite' not 'Pica' which meant the font was kinda tiny.  The keys pushed amazingly hard, too, and all in all I was a little deflated at the end of the first hour of putzing with it.  This was the most money I had ever spent on myself and the first money I had earned, so it was a Big Deal.  I kept at it and tried to learn to type on my own, but eventually gave up and went back to hand writing my diary, taking the typewriter out every now and again to play with. 

It wasn't until high school that I took a typing class with a very good teacher and then an Office Practice class for a total of four years of typing almost non-stop and became a fair to middling typist.  I'm no great shakes at it yet, and the Backspace Key and I are great friends, lol, but when we bought our first computer, I was in seventh heaven!  Word processors are Amazing. (I have an ergonomic keyboard--which never leaves me bored--(my apologies to Weird Al Yankovich) that I love, fantastic for carpal tunnel syndrome.)

Once again, like Prince, my long-coveted Pony (which I'll probably write about soon) Fantasy was much better than Reality when it came to the typewriter, but I'm glad I stuck with it.  And the same thing will probably hold true for the Round Stone House Ruin Thing, too.  But Carl's at the drawing board and bought some lumber after work last night so we can build window frames, so stay tuned.  

Will the Frost Get Us or Will the Stone House be our Undoing?

Let's hope all our Fantasies don't go Up in Smoke.