This has been a pretty typical autumn if we lived in other parts of the country – cool nights, warm days with an occasional rainy day or two. But not so typical for us. One of the “problems” with trying to find YouTube videos or read books about gardening/homesteading is they have much different weather than we do. We are generally warm with very slowly cooling nights, a day of light showers, back to relatively hot (80’s) days and warm nights, to a sudden drop of 10F or so and we very slowly move into winter. Like mid December. We’ve had some good solid rain already and weirdly, more in the valley than the foothills. We are over 200% normal and Wilton is 246% normal. Any way you look at it, autumn is definitely here and most of the summer garden has shut down! But some plants are enjoying a rebloom!
I pulled the cucumbers and cantaloupe plants a couple weeks ago. When the nights started getting into the 40’s they simply shriveled up. The potatoes are starting to die back so I will have to wait until it dries up a bit to dig those up. But the flowers are truly starting to shine as it has cooled off.
Some of the garden plants are hanging in there – the green beans have a last hurrah as do the tiny (!) pepper plants and my tomatoes. They don’t get much sun and are very scraggly plants, but they still produce. All three pepper plants are less than 12” tall! The pear tomato has regrown its branches from the bottom of the plane, and they are blooming while the green zebra and mid red tomato plants are barely hanging on but producing a fair amount of fruit. They are no longer blooming.
I primarily planted this garden with the idea of it being attractive to buyers but, we are still not in the ADU in Wilton. I will not plant a winter garden here but focus on MBD so I don’t have to come back to water it; if we become more “normal” again here and hit a dry spell. It is already becoming very pretty in the foothills because the rain is interspersed with some amazing sunny days and the grasses especially love that. It is spring green for the most part.
The fall blooming plants are also going to town. The chrysanthemums are blooming in full force and looking so bright. And just today I noticed the Camellias starting to open already. I hope they don’t get too cold now to continue to bloom!
This maybe my last post on the garden here because there is some glimmer of hope that we will move into the ADU! We cannot believe ImKat simply doesn’t finish the piddling things that are left to finish. We are 15 full months into this “maybe 6months” process. I’m truly disappointed in this company. We see someone from ImKat maybe every 3 weeks who does one small thing and leaves. I bet there isn’t 8 hours of work left to do! Sigh…