Hurry, Hurry!

The tree rats are getting pushy with their fall hunter-gatherer behavior. Not a good sign.

Sigh.

Today I guess I'll grab some hardy geranium cuttings to start new plants during winter.

I'm all seed gathered out. Man, that can get exhausting after a while. A sweater box jam packed full of flower seed should be plenty for winter sowing, right?

The new flower beds aren't getting anywhere. With D working weekends, my fall schedule has been thrown completely out of wack. The only good thing is that at this delay rate we'll be able to mow the leaves instead of rake. The clippings will be fantastic for the compost bin, too.

They finally chopped the corn field across the street. Yay! I have a view of the neighbors woods again.

I really should get out there and weed out the beds, but I just don't have the gumption.

The mums are looking fantastic, as are the snaps that rebloomed and the zinniaa are still going strong. The calendula have slowed, but are still hanging in. I've ripped all my containers and dragged the rest in for the winter.

The ponds are netted, but with the warm weather, the water is staying warm enough that the koi still wait for their meals every day.

I ripped out a lot of spurge that had gone bonkers, so the rock edges look neat and clean again. We got the rest of the stepping stone laid down through the pond walkways. Looks nice.

I transplanted a lot of thyme to the edges of the arbor pathway - regular and variegated. The contrast against the stone looks better, even though they're small yet.

I planted a few blanket flower sprouts in the half of the pond flowerbed that did get finished. I think I'll complement them with some black eyed susans, some verbena, lupine, maybe marigolds along the outer edge (lamium was a thought, but that's doing fantastic spillage on the opposite side of the path) and some zinnia on the inside edge. And a few drifts of cosmos - gotta have cosmos.

Hmmm ... maybe some purple coneflower. Nahhh, too clashy. Possibly gloriosa daisy. Iffy.

Amazingly, the mailbox bed is still doing well, so I'm holding off on ripping anything out of there yet.

I still need to clean off the front arbor and decide what will be climbing there next year. Someone offered me black eyed susan vine and some cypress vine, so maybe I'll give those a try at either end and put the pink hyacinth bean that did so well in the center. I don't know, I'll have to think on it.