We got a little bit of gardening done this weekend. It had been raining on and off most of the week, but it stopped on Saturday so we took advantage of that and decided to get outside to do a little bit of our “garden shut down” chores.
A week or so ago I was outside cleaning up the plants – getting rid of ones that had died off due to the cool weather and pruning some of the rose bushes. So this time around I didn’t have too much to do in the garden itself. That’s a good thing because I really need new work gloves – they sure take a beating when you have tons of roses!
Yesterday we took out all of our solar lights. I think we could leave them out during the winter, but I don’t like taking a chance that they’d be damaged by the heavy snow and moisture. Besides … we wouldn’t be able to see them come January or so anyway as they’d be covered in snow.
We also put away the garden torches. Each year we put some torches in the garden that we use to light up the garden and create atmosphere when we are entertaining at night. We fill them with a mixture of kerosene and Citronella oil to help keep the bugs away. Of course, we didn’t use the torches all that much this summer since it was so cool and rainy, so for much of the last week we had the torches burning in the garden to burn off the rest of the oil.
Other than tidying up a few planted containers that was pretty much our gardening chores for the weekend. All we need to do now is wait for more leaves to fall and then put them on the garden beds for the winter. The leaves help protect the plants. We even gather some of our neighbors leaves bags so that we can have extra leaves for the garden beds.
Did you do any gardening this weekend or were you busy doing Halloween stuff?
We passed on Halloween this year. We usually decorate the front of the house and give out candy to the kids, but we just couldn’t afford to buy all that candy this year. (it’s expensive!). Plus our dog seems to have turned into a barker and we figured that she’d be barking her head off every time some kids came to the door (probably scaring them). Maybe next year. Did you do Halloween?
This is the first year in ages that we didn’t do Halloween. I was busy flying to South America (I’m an international pilot), my kids are teenagers and they went to parties. So my wife decided not to decorate the house or give out candy. There were a lot less trick or treaters running around and also a lot fewer houses participating this year. On anther note, we live in South Florida and our gardening season is just beginning to kick in. We had been having record heat (in the 90’s) It’s finally nice enough weather to open the windows, turn off the a/c and put out the hammock in the garden.