The Biggest Fall Color

The Sisters arrived at the perfect time to see the peak of fall color and take their mother back to her wintering grounds. That means I have been busy this week. No reason not to share the fall color with you from high on the low spot of a North Carolina mountain top.

Bigger Fall Color

At the compound.

Fall Color

What these mountains do.

The Buddha remains.

And a pumpkin from the mystery melon patch.

Pestilence With Capital P

The wild pigs and every other kind pecker that lives up here are tearing up the gardens.

I am getting really annoyed.

I'm beginning to think nature is pissed off and letting me know it. The number of creatures regularly dining in the gardens the last two years is turning into the full compliment available. Or all the varmints I displaced have moved back in.

Maybe it is the flash drought that is sending the pigs to my moist. Please, I hope. I have plenty varmints already.

I wasn't paying attention and did not realize tropical storm Nestor was headed this way. It has begun to rain for real. Hopefully the drought is over. This will be a test of wet pigs.

Will water make the pigs go away? I'm hoping some hunters make the pigs go away. They are all over the place this time of year.

Perhaps it is the inevitable result of gardening, collecting and tending plants for a vegetarian buffet. It's bound to get noticed.

But the pigs have crossed my redline.

When I came home Friday afternoon, there was a plastic canister of Amdro ant bait at the top of the drive in the path going in to the roadside vegetable garden. I certainly had to ponder that. Too odd to be normal litter. How did it get there?

For the first time ever, the huge black carpenter ant mounds annoyed me enough to buy a jug of poison. Pestilence surpassing IPM. I used it. There was some left over in the jug sitting in a cow pot on the basement patio. It was gone.

Some damn varmint carried a plastic jug of Amdro ant bait all the way up to the top of my driveway before giving it up. It had a few teeth marks in the label. The creatures of the night are crawling under my house while I sleep. The pigs keep getting closer.

I absolutely will not be having anybody living underneath the Crooked Shed.

A Walk Up the Driveway

For a sack of peppers

And beyond

Good To The Last Aster

The Time of Vegetation began in a flood and ends in a drought. There were no meadow flattening events all season. Just too many damn varmints. At least there weren't any loose cows this year. It was a very good year of Bloom Days.

Good to the last aster.

The first real cold is arriving tomorrow and settling in for a couple days. The lows will be close enough to freezing to qualify as first frost arriving on the average schedule. It won't be a killing freeze. The Time of Vegetation can still slowly fade away in a blaze of color.

The native, Blue Wood Aster, Symphyotrichum cordifolium is the last dominant wild flower in the forest to finish blooming. It ends in blue then turns to fire before the Barren Time.

Mums can extend the bloom season just a couple weeks longer. They do struggle with the competition. That reminds me, I need to give the super pink one, 'Clara Curtis' another try.

That's my October Bloom Day report.