Late season blooms

Being in the "off" gardening season, I am sometimes at a loss for what to post about. All I need to do in that case is to go into my photo library and find one or several of the many photos I took during the season that I have not yet written about. Postings from now forward will probably have no rhyme or reason. It will just depend on what photo I stumble on in my travels.

Today there is glorious sunshine which is infusing me(well actually, my soul) with warmth, although it is just an illusion as it is very chilly outside. As the weather seems to be taking a turn right into winter, I am heartened by the knowledge that this mild autumn weather has kept us from having to use much of our oil for heating the house. I think God in His wisdom is helping out those of us who are trying to economize by keeping our thermostats lower this year than in the past. We are working on a daily temperature of 62 degrees. How are you working on keeping your expenses as low as possible? Any ideas that you have found helpful that may be of interest to others? I am adjusting to the lower temperatures here by wearing more layers of clothing, and keeping the house open to the full sunshine on these rare sunny days.

We had company in over the weekend and the temperature went up to 69 degrees with the house full of warm bodies!!!

So these photos are blooms that I found around the gardens in October, which is a month when you rarely see any color at all. The warmer temperatures this past season allowed lots of flowers to bloom again when usually they would have been long gone to rest. I think I had so many extra blooms this year due to the fact that I had let everything go to seed and did not cut back any of my plants until they were actually dead from the frost.
These beautiful Fringed Bleeding Heart flowers were hiding under their foliage, but the distinct color caught my eye amidst the faded hosta leaves next to them.




This wonderful mass of Asters surround the fading Hydrangeas providing a beautiful purple swath around the few blue blooms still in such striking color.




These are Mia's Dahlia's which are enjoying one last day in the warm sunshine before the hard frost is due. Hurray for us, I remembered to dig them before that heavy frost arrived to be able to enjoy them for next year. And I put them in a container in the cellar right near other items I will need in the spring so that I do not forget them!! (Well, hopefully, anyway!! LOL)




This was the greatest surprise of all this fall. This wonderful Clematis has been struggling for several years now. The tree it had been growing on fell in half years ago, and I have been working on keeping it growing ever since, with not much in the way of blooms, as compared to the Clematis by the garage.


So what else is new?? LOL - In trying to get this photo to show what the tree now looks like, it is stuck in this sideways position only in my blog!! I tried twice to get it to change and it won't, so this is what you get!!!



This Clematis has the most delicate purple color, that is does appear white from a distance. It is the same color as the Columbine which started coming up last year. How interesting!! This is one I got back in 1987 that is called a Double Blue color! How great that the season stayed so mild to give it a chance to finally bloom!!!

How I dry Hydrangeas

There has been a request fro information on how to dry Hydrangea blooms. This is a picture of one of my Hydrangea bushes, which has given me variations of colors from pink and purple to blue. How beautiful this is this year! This originally was a potted plant from Briggs that I got for the cemetery, and wisely decided to bring home shortly after the holiday for which it was purchased. It and several others have been planted around the front with varying degrees of success. Two of them, which many of you have been enjoying throughout the season have been just splendid this year, while three others are in very overgrown areas, and have not produced any blooms. I will be removing all the plants crowding them out in the next few weeks to prepare for a better opportunity for them to become shining starts next week. This is one of the blooms from my white Hydrangea, Paniculata Grandiflora, Peegee, which I obtained from the old State Police Headquarters site across the street 22 years ago. From one overgrown, tired out old plant I now have it in four areas of the garden where it has become so overgrown, I have already given out about two dozen shoots, in one area alone. These blooms become massive as the plant ages, with a beautiful spring show of greenish blooms changing to white as the season progresses. If you pick them before they turn brownish, you can just put them in a vase and they will dry just as they are. For the blue and pink varieties, you need to pick them just before they start to lose their color. I have several I picked last year that still retain a lot of their original color. Of course, if you want stems, you have to sacrifice part of the plant to cut the stems with the bloom. As I have been trying to let these plants stay as they are, I have only taken the blooms with not much stem. This plant has all the original blooms on it, as I did not pick any to dry out this year.