On and on

I will go on and on about the Christmas cactus. It is fantastic. I don't think I've ever had a year like this. It turns out that the thing to do with Christmas cactuses is to NOT WATER them for all of October. It's on fire with flowers.

Goose is getting fat

The Christmas cactus is doing really quite well now. There are two fully-opened flowers and luscious cerise buds on pretty much every terminus. What a good cactus.

Now I just need to figure out when would be a good time to propagate it. Surely after it's bloomed would be the right time. No worries about depleting its resources before it puts out exotic flowers.

Plot still emptier

We took away the last of the tomatoes and the (beautiful!) lettuce plants yesterday. There were a good few tomatoes rotting where they'd fallen, so hopefully next year we'll have some "volunteers".

The sweary one put in our plot number (it's 5) in the mandated corner. It's the corner least likely to be seen by anyone, but hey, who cares?

We also thinned out the onions. I'm really quite excited about them, actually. We have some bulbs already (which we plonked back into the ground) and I am hoping that next year we'll have full-grown actual onions to enjoy. Many red onions were flourishing, despite the cramped conditions. I'm not sure what the white ones will turn into, but we'll find out some time next year, I guess.

The plot is pretty much ready for the winter now. We keep meaning to learn the lesson of our plot-neighbour and put some seaweed (readily available around here) in a foot or so down, but we have yet to manage it. Some year, I guess.

Despite neglect

Despite the months and months of neglect, the side yard is still doing what it's supposed to. The lavender is blooming and the oregano/marjoram is, too. I was so pleased to notice that when I put the compost out this morning that I picked a stem and now my pockets and their contents smell pleasantly of lavender. What a delightful offshoot of taking the trash out.

Well, taking the compost out, anyway. The bin was so heavy that I could barely shift it. It goes out every 2 weeks, so this represents a good chunk of our leaf-sweeping. Hopefully the backyard is tamed now and we won't need to take much more out of there. The front we've only gone over once. My neighbour has about a dozen bags of leaves out this morning and there is a suspicious lack of leaves in the street and all around. I think he's been clearing for everyone. It's his style. We maybe should have a good go at our front and side, just to give the grass one last back-scratch before the freeze sets in, but there isn't anything that is in catastrophic need of clearing. The tree in front still has a good percentage of its leaves, anyway. The maple in back, on the other hand, is almost completely denuded.

Getting my hopes up

Just as all is dying in the outside world, the Xmas cactus is causing me to get my hopes up. It is positively dripping with buds. I don't water it very often, and I think that helps with the blooming (perverse plant that it is). But there have been years when the buds came to naught, so I really shouldn't get my hopes up.

Too late! My hopes are up!

First Snow

That's one week after the first frost, folks! We had snow this morning. Sure, it was slushy. It wasn't quite like the true snow of midwinter. However, I am not 100% certain that I won't have to shovel when I get home. We had that much snow. It's still there and it's afternoon. It's still there and it's been raining for 2 hours. Yes, that much.

Jack-o'lantern

The jack-o'lantern I showed in Sunday's post did triple service. I must remember this for next year. Once I had taken the stringy seed-filled pulp out, I carved away at its thick flesh for a while. I left thick enough walls to support carving (in truth, I probably should have taken out much more) and put the pumpkin meat into a covered casserole dish. I cooked it for about an hour at 350F and since then have used the (mashed) pumpkin to make muffins and bread. I will make more muffins tomorrow, I think.

We ate about 1/2 the seeds with lunch yesterday. They'd been cleaned, dried, and roasted, of course. I found that if I put the seeds in a rimmed baking tray (along the lines of a jelly-roll tin) I could easily either let them sit out or pop them into the oven whenever something else had finished cooking. I would wait until the oven had cooled a reasonable amount and then just let them sit in the warm to dry off. That worked well. I have often had trouble getting the seeds properly dry.

The third duty it did, of course, was to be the signal for the non-existent children of our neighbourhood to come by for chocolate. All the more for us, I suppose.

At my door, the leaves are falling

It's another stunning fall day out there. On Friday, the temperatures dropped and we had our first frost (that's Oct 30, 2009, for those of you keeping track). We walked to work through the public gardens, drinking in the thick air and admiring the frost-steam coiling off every surface the sun touched.

Our maple tree is still dropping leaves like they're going out of fashion, which of course they are. Last night it was very windy. I went out in the afternoon to get a composterful of leaves off the ground and within a half hour there was very little to show that I'd done the raking at all. It rained like crazy after that, but fortunately it held out until after the trick-or-treating was done. We had a grand total of 8 trick-or-treaters and that's including the two adults in costumes who came round collecting canned goods for the food bank.

At the market, between picking up fresh eggs and apple cider I passed some beautiful bulbs for sale and thought about picking some up. I want to try my hand at forcing some time and I haven't added any bulbs to the garden this year. But I thought that I was being silly: When would I have time or opportunity to put bulbs in the ground when it was already nearly November? But I absolutely had time, opportunity and motivation yesterday and today is nearly as perfect a gardening day. I shouldn't have dismissed the idea so quickly. Ah, well.