It feels like just yesterday that Cassandra posted about touching grass; it was actually two weeks ago, and the seasons have definitely shifted more towards the snowy side here in Chicagoland. In fact, the only place grass is visible in our yard is where we cleared paths to necessary areas, such as the birdfeeder and composter.
That said, it’s awfully pretty in a different way. The square lumps of the six matching raised beds amuse me, the leaves that fell after the snow (about 10 inches of shoveling, only 8 currently remaining), and the cluster of birds around the birdfeeder, scattering seeds all around it. It is the ideal time of year to appreciate the beauty of our garden… from the comfort of a heated house.
I swear, from one day to the next, the trees suddenly changed color. I’m sure there was a progression, yet I somehow missed it. What I haven’t missed is the subsequent delivery of many of those beautiful leaves onto our lawn.
Three photos over the course of four days show the slow progression, most noticeably in the upper left branches, which are now creeping towards bare. It could be gradual from here, with more branches showing each day… or, as happens periodically when you live near the Windy City, a blusterous day could sweep in and shake the rest of those leaves lose. That already happened to a tree across the street.
*checks the weather forecast for the next week or so*
Done well before the first snow!
And, delightfully, done mulching for the season.
For those of you following along at home, we went through about 35 cubic yards of mulch this year, dispersing it to a mix of previously and newly mulched areas, such as around the raised beds in the vegetable garden (old) and creating a back perimeter path (new). Our most recent new spot, which finished out the mulch pile, is in the front yard, set up for a variety of fruit that will be growing in the area.
Normally, I’d say we’re done gardening for the season. It is, after all, November. But the growing season has been entirely weird, I picked some raspberries earlier this week and we have some white strawberries still, though I don’t expect those will have time to ripen. It’s warm enough that weeding can still happen, which is really just a head start for spring weeding.
Every year, John Kovalic designs a new plush for Gamehole Con, the parent convention that hosts Dorkstock. A couple years ago, it occurred to me that I could combine those plush into a Monster Island game, a game I’ve owned for a couple decades now. The hard part, beyond retroactively acquiring a second set of most of the plush (the owlbear, alas, is no longer available), was coming up with their stats and special abilities while keeping the variety of creatures somewhat balanced in game play.
Among other things, I needed to take into account that some abilities just wouldn’t be useful against other monsters. The cute orange beast pictured here, for example, is a Rust Monster. But the other monsters don’t wear armor! They do, however, have the ability to pick up and throw several crocheted food trucks and garbage cans, all of which are theoretically made of metal. While it would have been amusing to let the Rust Monster just destroy those items, it seemed better to let is recover health by consuming them, though playtesting went through a couple iterations of what that restored health value would be.
But I didn’t make the food trucks just for the Rust Monster. Food trucks are part of the Gamehole Con tradition, adding food options beyond the convention center selection. And if there are food trucks, well, there have to be people (OK, meeple) gathered near them. This was one of the places where I tweaked the Monster Island game mechanics… each monster has two special abilities, and they’re activated by consuming meeple. That includes the Rust Monster’s ability to heal by consuming metal… they lost in the last playtest round because while they were in reach of a metal item, they were out of meeple. Oops. (The pictured kobold is a stand-in from 9th Level Games’ Kobolds Ate My Baby!, since the kobold is this year’s plush.)
While both scheduled Monster Island events for this weekend are sold out, the rules and plush will be available in Dorkstock’s games library for play in the room (Waubesa – up on the second floor of the convention center) for anyone who feels a need for a silly kaiju battle.
Most years, after the mulberries are done for the season, I do a quick trim of the branches I can reach that are extending too far over the lawn. A couple key phrases in that sentence were “most” and “I can reach”… I am not particularly tall, and I never quite got around to bringing the ladder out each year to trim the higher branches. That resulted in quite a sprawl, particularly at the higher levels, that I didn’t really want to deal with myself, and a fruit tree that was taller than we wanted, primarily because we had no way to reach so much of that fruit.
If you’ve never had mulberries – and I personally have never seen them available uncooked in stores – you might be wondering why we didn’t just collect them when they fell. Mulberries are quite juicy, while resembling a small blackberry. I assume this juiciness is the reason for the lack of commercial availability; they don’t keep well. It also means that when they hit the ground, they immediately collect dirt. To be fair, this doesn’t stop the birds, rabbits, and other critters from eating them… we’re just a bit pickier.
I decided earlier in the summer to hire someone to trim the tree, rather than having to find the time to trim it and get the branches down to the appropriate size for the township’s branch pick-up. As you can see in this photo taken during the trimming, there were some sizable branches removed. Conveniently, my neighbor had hired a company, Paulo & Sons Tree Services (who can be reached here), mid-summer, when his branch overhanging my driveway cracked near the trunk. I kept their contact information, promising to reach out once the mulberry harvest ended for the season.
To be clear, our mulberry season usually finishes in July, nicely timed with our next wave of raspberries and strawberries, affording us the opportunity for some triple berry dishes. This has been a strange growing season in our garden – I picked a ripe strawberry today, in October, and saw another recently formed flower – and our mulberry harvest didn’t actually wind down until mid-September. In fact, the timing worked out nicely for the tree trimming to happen in cooler weather; it was still in the 80s last week. I’m hoping the raspberries are about done, so I can trim them before the branch pick-up ends for the season. (Edit: the raspberries said “I’m not dead yet!” So I ate some.) I’m happy with the trimmed mulberry, and glad someone else did the work.
As I mentioned recently, we needed a bit more mulch before the winter weather hits. After a couple weeks, I cancelled my Chip Drop request – I can always enter a new one – and bought some mulch after my garden planner said these magic words: “If we don’t mulch it, we need to sod lift the whole area.”
Yeah, I’d rather mulch it. Here’s the work in progress, starting with a perimeter mulch path at the edge, then a combination of sod removal and mulching. The areas where grass was removed are destined for more immediate planting of somewhat tall plants. We briefly considered a metal edging for the perimeter plant, so the mulch doesn’t wash into the neighbor’s grass when it rains, but realized how expensive that would get given that the entire north edge has a bit of a slope into his yard. We’re looking at a plastic edging instead.
A new pile of dark brown mulch – about 10 cubic yards – on our driveway, the day it was delivered.
A 2-foot wide line of mulch along the edge of our property in the northwest corner of our yard.
A mulched area around the lilac, with a small portion where we did sod lifting instead for upcoming planting.
A view from the side patio to the mulch pile, showing the recently mulched area and the remaining grass for the northwest corner, which will all be mulched over or removed.
One our perpetual summer projects is acquiring and distributing mulch around the yard, to help with weed suppression and generally improve the appearance of the yard. Earlier in the spring, I had a request in with GetChipDrop.com for wood chips, hoping to get a free (or close to free, with optional donation) supply of wood chips to mulch the yard. ChipDrop partners with local arborists and gardeners to mutual benefit: the arborists get somewhere local to drop the wood chips, and the gardeners don’t have to call every tree company or outright purchase mulch. It’s a simple process, but it doesn’t mean the availability of wood chips is sporadic. Each request is good for a month, and when we returned from the Canary Islands without having received wood chips, I bit the bullet and ordered mulch from a local supplier. (To be clear, their mulch is fabulous… but mulch is not cheap.)
The initial distribution wave went quickly – from delivery on May 3rd to the second photo on May 10th, we probably distributed half of the mulch. This was the easy phase, re-mulching areas that were mulched in previous years. You can see how good the fresh mulch looked around the raised vegetable beds. We have a large yard and progressed fairly quickly through those initial 10 cubic yards. I was quickly becoming concerned with other areas of the garden I wanted to mulch as I ran through the pile.
So, before clearing the entire pile, I placed a new request through GetChipDrop.com on a Friday… and received a response Saturday morning asking if I wanted a 15-yard delivery. Woot! It wasn’t until partway through distributing the refreshed pile that I named it “Mount Mulchmore.”
The process inevitably slowed, between some intolerably warm weather, my wasted time at PT, and our discussions as to which areas needed weeding before mulching and which should have landscape paper set down first. I expanded the back border to put more distance between myself and the poison ivy lingering under the neighbor’s white mulberry tree. And then, in mid-August, after mulching around the strawberry bed, I cleared the rest of the pile.
In this particular instance, I’m referring to my anxiety related to nests inhabited by stinging insects, particularly wasps. You may recall a couple years ago, I had a terrible Saturday morning when I accidentally disturbed a yellowjacket nest on the east side of our house, safely tucked between an empty planter and our shed. This past Saturday, I was talking to my neighbor about our plethora of balls in the deck box, specifically in relation to something his puppy could use. (The deck box moved to this house a couple years ago and had not been sorted through in that time.) I had already handed him an old volleyball of mine that was stored under a nearby bench, but flipped up the lid to show him how many other balls we have. As we stood there talking, I noticed movement in my peripheral vision and realized that there was a hornet’s nest on the underside of the lid.
I swore, and we both immediately moved away from the box, him in response to my action before he noted the nest as well. We both took a few more steps for safety, and he offered to lend me the wasp spray he owned, though we both noted that it should wait until evening – wasps tend to be active during the day and dormant at night, so the ideal time to spray a nest is when most of them are clustered on it, resting. I sent Cassandra a warning to avoid the side patio and after lunch, we wandered off to an Arts & Crafts Fair at Morton Arboretum.
As the afternoon wore on, I noted that the impending thunderstorm might interfere with my plan to spray the nest that evening. Before the rain started – splendid rain, bringing about four inches of water to our yard – we had some high winds that caused me – after it started raining – to pop out the side door and see if the lid to the deck box was still open. Upon discovering that it wasn’t, I stepped out under the overhang and carefully flipped the lip open again, thinking that when the opportunity arose to spray the nest, I didn’t want to disturb them with the motion of opening it again.
A little while later, the rain let up, so I popped outside, grabbed the can, sprayed the nest thoroughly, and promptly ignored it for the rest of the evening as the rain came and went. Come morning, I verified that the nest was empty, noting several corpses in the deck box. I used a plastic bag to grab the nest, tied it off, and dropped it into our garbage can. I then emptied the entire box, organizing as I went… and much to my dismay, discovered a trio of yellowjackets tucked into the palm of a rather wet softball glove. The dismay was augmented when I dumped them into the grass and they began moving! Fortunately, they were the only ones, though I did proceed carefully in case there was another nest buried in the box.
Once the box was empty, I hauled it onto the grass, scrubbed it down, and left it to dry. In the afternoon, we started to refill the box, though we left some damp items drying nearby. We closed the lid… which turned out to be a mistake. When I went back out to put other items into the box, there were a few hornets at the spot where the nest had been, presumably trying to rebuild. I left the lid open again and retreated. When I returned a while later, they were gone, and I sprayed the area again to discourage them from returning.
A couple days later, with no evidence of hornets in the open box, I finally closed the lid again. So far, so good.
It’s been a weird growing season. Yes, I started things like tomatoes late, but the okra, beans, and corn were planted at appropriate times. You wouldn’t know it from looking at them. The okra is the smallest of them, just finally peeking over the edge of the raised bed it’s planted in. There are a few beans on the bushes, and most of the corn is still shorter than me. (And I’m pretty short!) The back vegetable garden has just been growing slowly this year, well, except for the kale and chard, which are huge. The surviving squash, cucumber, and melon plants in the back are just barely showing off flowers. And it’s mostly been outside our control, just the weird range of hot and dry weather we had earlier in the season, with the occasional cool dips. The surviving plants have started to expand – later than usual – as the weather has almost settled into something resembling normal. And our grass has replenished from the intermixed brown that carried into July.
It’s not all bad though… our berries have been amazing this year, from the ever-bearing strawberries (now preparing for a third harvest round), raspberries, and a mulberry tree that would normally have been done a month ago and is still filled with a plethora of red (still ripening to purple) berries. Our grand success for the season, however, sits in the front yard, a placeholder for an area that will acquire more fruit in future years. In fact, the white pumpkins’ vines filled those placeholder spots and sprawled across the new herb garden, eclipsing the basil and cilantro in their beds. With an anticipated two months or more of growth still left, some of the pumpkins are already huge and new ones are still forming. If we’re lucky, at least in terms of the garden, fall will come slowly and we’ll be able to harvest some delicious treats from the back yard.
It’s been a weird start to our growing season, between our travel and a cooler than normal spring. Because of our travel, anything that was supposed to be started indoors for our client – typically in March or thereabouts – was started early May in our house. That accounts for the eggplant (complete failure this year, none of them started), two varieties of broccoli, and two varieties of large tomatoes. They moved outside last week and are still small enough in their garden beds that they didn’t photograph well. Fortunately, we have some vegetables that are proceeding nicely… not the okra though, where only three plants have appeared so far.
In the keyhole bed, the kale sits as a giant above the chard and next to the spindly scallions. At the far edge of the bed, carrots have volunteered next to the peas. Outside the bed in the keyhole opening, a tall garlic has caught up to the peas in the bed.
Hiding in the just mulched (this morning!) bed are two hills of watermelon seedlings and two of cantaloupe seedlings. I should absolutely thin these out more. Yes, more, I’ve already killed off about half of the seedlings on each hill.
One the left, clearly visible, are the Coco Black Bush Beans surrounded by mulch; they’ll get either cages or trellises to climb soon. On the right, fairly hidden because of the fresh mulch (also this morning!) are several short rows of corn.
The North Georgia Candy Roaster, a variety of squash, is coming in nicely in most of the divided bed, except for the squares that had leftover mustard greens from last year. The greens have now flowered and will presumably be reseeding themselves.
Three hills of tromboncino seedlings in pairs with some small catnip near the front and a tall catnip in the back just waiting to be harvested and dried.
Though not pictured, it is also strawberry season, which will be joined soon by raspberry and mulberry season. That said, I’m stepping outside to plant more okra, three plants just doesn’t cut it.
