Good Bye Summer

Heirloom Zinnia in the new front bed

Yesterday it was 80 degrees when I drove into town.  Tonight NOAA is predicting temps in the low teens; to this point, we've had a few nights with a light frost.  This will be our first hard freeze of the year.  I've got some low tunnels planted with greens like kale, lettuce, and spinach.  We'll see how they do. 

I finally got all the garlic planted and covered with straw last week.  This will be my first year of growing it in the new garden.  I'm curious how it will do.  I planted hard neck varieties (Spanish Roja and Siberian), as well as some unidentified type that I brought home from my dad's garden in Maine.  As with all gardening efforts here, I'm prepared for disappointment.  My dad also warned that the first few years of planting garlic, the cloves produced might be small, because it takes a few years for it to adapt to local growing conditions. 

Purple Sage in the front bed

I really didn't plant anything in the garden this summer. Even though it was wetter than usual overall, it was difficult just to keep alive the perennials I planted the year before--rhubarb, asparagus, Comfrey, Jerusalem artichokes, and horseradish.  However, they did make it through their first winter and summer of living in the high desert, and I'll count that as a success.  My intentions had been to install a drip watering system so I wouldn't have to haul water from the stock tank, but I got distracted by other things and that project will have to wait until next year. 

We did get lots of sunflowers that re-seeded from last year.  Birds, mice, and the wind spread the seeds through the garden.  Some of the heads are enormous.

Re-seeded sunflower

Somewhere in the middle of this summer, I found myself in the midst of a project I took on without really noticing I was doing so.  It started with wanting to plant a few flowers in one of the existing flower beds in front of the house.  It seemed ridiculous to just dig a hole in the midst of the weeds so I started digging out the end of one of the flower beds to clear space--which led to totally re-digging that bed, and then to re-doing all the existing beds and creating some new ones.  I also put up some chicken wire fencing.  It's not enough to keep out a determined varmint, but it's enough to provide some discouragement.  The project isn't finished but the yard already looks much improved.

Agastache in the front bed, with Hummingbird Moth

It was early August when I got started with this work, so the plants I put in got a very late start.  Regardless, the annuals (Cosmos and Zinnias) were in long enough to bloom for a few weeks) and the perennials long enough to develop some new roots. We attracted lots of pollinators, including Hummingbird Moths, hummingbirds, and many kinds of native bees and wasps.  I'll be sad to see the insects go (except for the flies) with the coming cold weather.  The cosmos look fabulous right now, but they'll likely get hit by tonight's freeze.

Cosmos in the front bed