A Visit From Jack Frost
October 15 - October 20, 2024
Weekly journal of a Midwest gardener…
Monday, October 14, 2024
I spent the morning researching a Lost Lady of Garden Writing, which led me to request that the public library add another book to their collection so I could check it out.1 I spent the afternoon with my garden club, learning about the trees at Crown Hill Cemetery with the arborist as our guide.2 The weather was perfect for walking and tree-gazing. We even saw a bald eagle! After the meeting, I drove back into the cemetery to see if I could find my grandparents’ graves. I knew the section to go to, but there must have been a thousand graves in that one section. “It’s the thought that counts.” Right?
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Now we are feeling some Fall weather, with a bit of dreary rain on the side. Queue up some tiny quinoa-sized hail for show. Grand total in the rain gauge once the sun came out was .14 inches. I’ll take it and some more, please. In the meantime, indoors, I wrote a Substack article about Zila A. Robbins, another Lost Lady of Garden Writing with ties a bit closer to home. My fruit snack today was a few figs from my garden, which I picked on Sunday, along with the last of the peppers and tomatoes.
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
I didn’t look out soon enough to know if we got any frost but when I finally did look out I decided we hadn’t as those plants that would be most affected were all standing tall. I trimmed and mowed the lawn3, filled the bird feeders, watered the mums and pansies in containers, and cut down the corn stalks out in the Vegetable Garden Cathedral. Then with a few swipes of my hands to brush off the dirt, I congratulated myself. “That’s a job done.”4
Thursday, October 17, 2024
There was no missing that we had frost this morning. Rooftops, lawns, everything in the Vegetable Garden Cathedral was coated with a heavy frost. Ol’ Jack Frost must have brought his friends. I went out before breakfast to take pictures as if I’d never seen frost before this morning. Then, without the guilt of doing it too soon, I cleared off the blackened plants in the garden, mostly peppers, tomatoes, and beans.5 I think one more pass through the veg garden to clear out weeds and annual flowers should do it, then I’ll cover each bed with leaves as they become available.
Friday, October 18, 2024
Days pass quickly, don’t they? Today was a podcast recording day. Dee and I only went off the rails a few times, which should make for a good episode. No hints. You’ll have to read our newsletter next week to find out more. Or listen next week.6 The other garden-y event of the day, besides watering containers, was I got the second half of my fall bulb order. The 500 crocuses.
Saturday, October 19, 2024
There is something about October, isn’t there? Life seems to slow down on these pretty fall days, even as the days shorten. Today was a typical, beautiful fall day, and also the day of the week when I do most of the inside cleaning, by habit.7 I did manage to spend a bit of time outdoors. It would have been wrong not to!
Sunday, October 20, 2024
I was delighted to see the autumn crocuses in full bloom in a border in my back garden. Every year, I look for them just a bit sooner than I should, and I wonder if they’ve disappeared when I don’t see them. It’s almost a fall ritual for me to do so. But then one morning, like this morning, there they are. They are slowly multiplying, and now I want more! I wrote a blog post about them in 2020, so decided not to write about them again today, but I did add a reel on Instagram to show how pretty they are.
That’s a Week!
As sometimes happens, after we had that frost on Thursday morning, the weather turned warmer again. I looked at the extended forecast and see nothing close to frost. I think the beautiful weather we ended this week with will stay with us at least through the end of October. I hope to spend much of that time outdoors.
Where Else to Find Me…
My home base is my website.
My main blog is still May Dreams Gardens.
You can put my books on your bookshelves.
And listen to me on the weekly podcast, The Gardenangelists.
And check out Lost Ladies of Garden Writing, another interest.
Maybe follow me on Instagram to read letters to my garden.
Quotable
“Go back?” he thought. “No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!” - Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien8
Forward to the next audiobook. I have The Hobbit9 queued up from the library to listen to now that I’ve finished all the Harry Potter books.
I’ve decided to ask the library to add books to their collection that I don’t have but would like to read or that I have and would like to recommend to others who might want to check them out from the library. They added the first book I requested, The Grove, by Ben Dark. I’m now waiting to hear back on two more: Not Just a Homemaker, by Paulette Brooks, and today’s request, T. R. Otsuka: Japanese Landscape Artist in the American Midwest, by Beth Cody.
Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis is a Level II arboretum with over 11,000 inventoried trees representing 137 unique species. We saw what we could in our one-hour tour, including an American Elm. Most of the trees were just beginning to turn colors. Due to the dry conditions, other trees, like black cherry, had dropped most of their leaves already.
While mowing, I listened to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Monty Don seems to say “that’s a job done” a lot on BBC’s Gardeners’ World.
All those plants from the veg garden that were knocked down by the frost went to the trash. I don’t like to compost them because my compost piles don’t get hot enough to kill off plant diseases and bad bugs that like to overwinter in their host plants.
If you are one of those people who don’t listen to podcasts, you might still find the newsletter of interest. I know several people who subscribe to The Gardenangelists newsletter but never listen to the episodes. If you want to know how to listen to a podcast, check out this blog post I wrote for instructions.
I took advantage of being busy with inside chores to finish listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book of the series. I checked my Goodreads profile and figured out that I probably started listening to the first Harry Potter book on audio around August 1—I finished it on August 8—so it took me nearly three months to get through all seven books.
I actually had a quote in mind from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the end of this newsletter, but I couldn’t find it. That’s the trouble with audiobooks. How do you underline or highlight a passage that you want to refer back to? And it was a good one, too. Oh well. If I’m meant to find it again, I’ll find it.
Yes, I saw The Hobbit movie, but no, I never read The Hobbit. I guess none of my high school teachers thought it was important to read it, and perhaps it wasn’t. But now it feels like I should read it, or listen to it as the case may be.