The Days, The Hours, The Moments: Day 246 ~ The Garden On The Verge Of Autumn (LOTS of pictures!)…

Ah Dear Ones…

Since I told you yesterday about work I am doing in the garden now to prepare for autumn I thought I would show you pictures, a little garden tour. It doesn’t look like much right now because, as I said yesterday, I have just done a very heavy pruning/deadheading/heavy feeding to encourage loads of flowers for fall, but you can not only see what the garden looks like today, and the 3 different sections that I tend, but the very last picture at the bottom of this post is from just about a year ago, in late October, just a month after the hurricane. There were a few pots on the porch and little else.

The azaleas, which were beautiful when I moved in, but never recovered from the house fire in 2014, and were straggly with few flowers, have been cut as close to down to the ground as possible making way for a pot garden. My feet are so disabled and at 65 I can no longer dig in the ground anymore, but I would like to show senior citizens and those who may be disabled in some way, that you can garden on the cheap in pots and have fun. My pots were free or cheap, things people didn’t want anymore or Dollar Store finds, every single plant was purchased on sale, the huge pots of impatiens on the front porch steps I got for a dollar apiece and they were tiny and straggly. I put 6 in each pot, said a prayer, and have kept them well watered and fed and they have just gone like gangbusters since Spring!

In last night’s post I mentioned that I divide my garden into 3 sections to manage the large work involved. When I water I have to water the whole garden at once of course, but with the feeding regimen that requires mixing multiple fertilizers in a gallon jug I then fill with water, 12 jugs at a time, I can break the feeding down in 3 different days because it is so much mixing and filling jugs and toting them out and watering and feeding the plants that it takes a long time and my weary body just gives out. I did Section 1, the porch garden, a couple of nights ago. Tonight I am going to do this section which I call Section 2, and Thursday I will do Section 3 that you see below.

This is so much fun and when everything is blooming there is a riot of color out there but the long hot summer had everything grown up so much it was starting to get scraggly. Everything has been cut back hard this week and in a month or a little longer it should be glorious here. I wanted you to see the “before” picture when not much is flowering. And mind, do you SEE all the giant trees around my house? I love them but when a hurricane comes through it is terrifying. And this year when the hurricane was to come through I thought, “Oh my GOD! All these POTS!” but my darling daughter Rachel, son-in-law Jeremy, and sweet 15 year old grandson Lucas came a few days before the hurricane was to hit, moved as many of the small pots as they could in my front room, and moved ALL the other plants packed in tight against the house. A couple of days AFTER the hurricane came through they came and moved ALL of the pots back out. It’s a LOT of pots!

I love my magical blue door, the entrance to Dragonfly Cottage. Molly and I and Maisy and Daisy and all the other creatures and small beings, feathered, fur, winged, and the ones only we can see, live happily on the other side of that door! And just look at those $1 impatiens!

These roses are so much more beautiful than you can see here and there were tons of roses on them all summer but I’ve just cut the bushes back hard except for the handful of blooms just opening. I think it’s one of my favorite roses I’ve ever grown and I’ve grown many, many roses in my life. This is a modern hybrid tea rose called ‘Crescendo.’ There are 2 growing up both of the main front porch pillars. On the 2 outer pillars on opposite ends of the porch are the classic ‘Ballerina’ roses, hybrid musks, and they are super lovely but not blooming right now. They will again in the fall.

This was last year, a few weeks after the hurricane hit. And just looking at this picture makes me sad because this was less than 2 weeks before I lost my beloved Delilah pug, followed by finding out I had a serious blood clot in my leg, and then my darling Pugsley, my last pug, died the day after Christmas. My baby Tanner pug had died in April. When this picture was taken things were in the middle of being cleaned up from the hurricane but after a ton of debris was cleared from the front of the house I bought the pumpkins for Halloween which delighted me. Little did I know that my precious Delilah would pass the day after Halloween. Oh my goodness what a difference a year makes, and we just keep going, and growing, and moving along. And when this picture was taken I hadn’t even imagined a life full of art and Maisie’s world. Take heart, there is always something wonderful coming just around the bend…

Blessings and Love To One and All…