The Road Into Winter

There is a 60% possibility that on Friday morning I will wake up to a world transformed. The current conditions of a barren twiggy brown could turn to black and white.



That is why the road into winter must be planted with conifers. The requirement for the color green is encoded in the DNA of a gardener. I will be needing green in my garden to be to take me through the winter.



The wild cultivated garden looks mostly like this. Much of the structure comes from memory. Pockets of conifers and expanding drifts of evergreen rhododendrons can not begin to fill a garden well over an acre in size. The resident gardeners preference for floral displays, dominant habitat of shade and fleeing the scene of the garden in winter has resulted in sparse winter interest or structure. They're not here. They don't care.



My garden will have to be different. It will need to proudly claim its gardeness throughout the year. Conifers, structured paths, stone work, sculpture, evergreen screens and walls, whatever it takes to draw me outside into the garden all year long will be done.



One day I might even be able to afford some funky and fun specimen conifers for focal points.

Trim

I dreamed I was in an apple orchard at the peak of harvest season.



Actually there are dreams of getting some decent sized apples from the best tasting tree in the ridge top garden. After two years of suggesting by certain someones I finally climbed into the top of that apple tree and cut out upwards of two dozen, small to large, fifteen foot tall water sprouts from the top of the tree.



It is hard to tell the difference when the background is all bare branches. Trust me there is significantly less of the apple tree. The next step will be to trim out upwards of 70% of the remaining smaller stems and branches. Less fruit set means bigger and better apples next fall.

If we actually harvest and eat them, then the deer are far less likely to come in there and stomp all over everything while they are eating all the small fallen apples on the ground. Or at least we can hope.



The last piece of beadboard is on the bottom of the sewer insulation box and the other trim job is well under way.



A narrower corner trim piece will go along the edges of the boxes. Hopefully I can just reverse the corner trim and put it in the recessed corners on the sides and bottom up against the girder.



So if southern tradition says I need to paint my patio ceiling light blue like the sky to keep the haints away,



Why not dream about painting a real the sky up there?

Up There

The sun was trying to come out. Would it be sunny up there when I got back home? The forever undulating fog between top and bottom always leaves you guessing.



Yes the sun was out up there for a spell. Long enough to finish the banister and railings on the stairs headed down to the basement patio and the gardens to be.



The ridge line of Sandy Mush Bald to Crabtree Bald is a bit higher than me. I am in one of the folds on the side of the mountain off to the left and out of this picture.



It is a little late for a dumbwaiter. The thought entered my mind more than once of course. It would be an extravagance at the expense of exercise. I will just have to use the rear service entrance stairs to fetch light snacks and refreshments.

Now that there are handrails



When the fog descends to engulf my world



It will be safer to appear like an apparition floating down the grand staircase.



Or to disappear into the mists in ascension.

All The Little Details

The cold returned. The rain returned. It looks suspiciously like it wants to snow. It is only fair considering it is now heading into the last week of November.

The physically easier detail work that needs doing to complete the ambiance of the basement patio proceeds with cold fingers. It is easier in the sense that the parts are smaller. You must discount the crawling on your hands and knees and lying on your back in the dirt to screw in screws and hammer in nails upside down. Soon it will all be done.

I like the way the lattice between the posts of the back stoop turned out.



A similar treatment will be considered for the front porch posts, though the steep elevation change along that run of posts will necessitate a slightly different approach.



This whole corridor is turning into a marvel of engineering. Thank goodness for the building contractor. He can see things I have trouble visualizing. Once the concept is worked out I can concentrate on some of the smaller details.



Both banisters and railings for the long steps are built and one of them was actually fastened into place today during a break in the rains. Be good to have those when the steps are covered in snow and/or ice. I have this determination to check things off the list as finished before I head inside for the winter. I can certainly try.

And The Winner Is

The entry for Gardening Gone Wild's November photo contest is



Into The Wilderness - Back Home

Thank you so much to everyone who voted. The final tally was:
Into The Wilderness - 10
The Edge Of Winter - 7 and
No crossing - 3.
As best as I could tell with some votes just as indecisive as I was.

The funny thing is the chosen winner was only added to the choices at the last minute. It was good, but not the most striking image to me.

I'd have to go back and count but I think The Edge Of Winter would have won as everyone's favorite photo. I need to win me an Amaryllis though so many of you voted for the most likely to win, not necessarily your favorite. That is so good of you.

Thanks again for the help in picking an entry. There is some strong competition and you never know what will strike the judges interest. It is fun trying, more so with a little help.

You would not believe how long it took to make this post with the heinous Hughes satellite internet punishing me with mega slow speed that drops the connection half the time. I keep mentioning this so it will come up in searches when people are looking at this service. Bad publicity. Take that Hughes, you lousy ISP that charges the same price as reliable high speed internet.

The Punishment - Phase Two

Adobe patiently waited its turn. It has now contacted its Mother Brain and is downloading updates. Hughes satellite internet service detected a breach in its stingy access to the internet and BAM! My computer is now back to slower than dial-up speeds.

Time to step away again. I will put on some long underwear to go plant mums before it really is too late and do some more work on the cozy cabin's sewer insulation box.

One of the good things about my own computer is that it has the photo files from a former life.



A garden on Maui in the third week of November toys with the idea of snow in the form of a Philippine Poinsettia, Euphorbia leucocephala.

Nobody's Home

Another day of paid work - I am grateful for massive quantities of fallen leaves - so I stopped to get a closer look at the house at the end of the holler. Nobody is home.



It is a tidy abandonment. A few boarded up windows, screen door frames on the porch and a rock by one door to keep it from blowing in the wind no doubt gave its emptiness away. It looks like it should be a home and I can picture my own grandparents living here though their home was quite a bit different.

Kind of like how my Hughes satellite internet service was the other day. Nobody was home.

I switched computers and hooked my own back up. It immediately began to talk to the Mother Brain to find out what it had missed while it was dormant. Massive uploads of updates and repairs ensued and that stinking Hughes network punished me by slowing the speed to a crawl. I thought it best to step away during my punishment so the monitor didn't end up smashed.



There were no animals in the barns and no cows in the pasture.

And when I got home late this afternoon there was no Crawford and no Collar waiting to be let in and fed. I called and called and didn't hear even the faintest stirring. Yesterday they were sitting on the front deck waiting when I arrived. Today they were no where to be seen.

When I left this morning the hunters and the surveyors were parked at the turnout. This afternoon, no kitties were home. My heart sank into the pit of my stomach. Where oh where are my sweet kitties now?



Normal fluctuating Hughes internet speeds have returned. My punishment is over. The computer is still updating itself from all the data supplied by the Mother Brain and has to be restarted several times a day.

One reason to switch computers is that the other one has issues with the graphics card and some sites can cause it to freeze up. When that happens I won't visit those sites anymore. Kylee's Our Little Acre was one of the places that froze up the computer. I will have to visit her now and see what happens.



An hour after dark Crawford and Collar decided to come home. Were they hiding some where afraid to come out? Had they gone for a really long afternoon stroll? Oh why oh why don't my sweet kitties come the moment I call?

A Very Late Fall

Dense fog usually follows the rains.



You just never know if it will be down there or up here and if it is down there it could be anywhere. Go over a hill and you can be entering or exiting the fog. Go up or down and you could be entering or exiting the fog. Fog has a mind of its own.



I drove through it and found it was fog free in town. A sunny and cool day that was quite pleasant for garden tidying and leaf raking.

There will be more leaf raking to come because the Liquidambar styraciflua 'Rotundifolia' is just now deciding that it is fall. This Sweetgum has rounded leaf margins and is fruitless, so it does not have the spiny balls which is nice. It is also putting on a much better fall showing than last year.



There was even a bit of actual fall color on some of the Japanese Maples. Just above the top of this picture the leaves were all a crispy brown in a rather distinct line.



Seeing this and another Japanese Maple in a different garden in a blaze of color has me convinced that the marginal hardiness of these maples here often means the fall color is lost to early freezes. It seems these maples need a longer time to turn. The blast of snow and patchy frost we have had so far froze the leaves of entire trees, parts of some and missed others all together. Then it turned warmer and has stayed that way for the most part. The ones that were not frozen are now putting on a color show that I have not seen before.



Even this camellia was zapped last year in its prime. The plant is quite hardy. The flowers are not. It might even manage to finish blooming before the next blast of winter arrives. Good thing it sets flower buds at the end of the summer growing season.



Quite the nice camellia at the edge of its hardiness zone. It does have a good south facing exposure, half day full sun actually, not a camellia preference, in a planter bed in the parking area. Definitely not a planting situation I would recommend for a camellia further south.



It was nice to come down from the naked mountain top and see bits of fall left over and very late in the season.