Another Confused Flower and Scary Puppy

This week has been beautiful. The daytime temp has been in the 60's or 70's with sunny or partly sunny skies. I'm afraid some of our plants are really confused. Here is a Vinka blooming just like it is spring and there are more bloom starting. Next week these plants will get a giant shock when the high temp is projected to be under 50 degrees. We can hope "they" are as bad with this prediction as they were with the hurricanes this year and the plants will get a reprieve. A scary moment yesterday when our Great Dane puppy (has gone from 30 to 60 pounds in 2 months) decided to jump the width of the pond. I'm happy he made it but - talk about bad habits. This is one I need to figure out how to break. Somehow he needs to learn the pond may be a water bowl but it is not a obstacle course.

Plants Prepare for Winter

Over the past week, we've spent time preparing the water plants for winter. Many were put in the new greenhouse I built this summer. Some came inside the house and some are in the old greenhouse. In the process we cleaned the 5 small water gardens on the front porch and I found one of them had 3 tadpoles. Those tadpoles were moved to the 20 gallon bucket by the pond. We also cleaned the rest of the 20 gallon buckets. In one we disturbed a hibernating bullfrog so we restored his environment and will leave that bucket out for him this winter. In another we found a bunch of tadpoles which we transferred to the new tadpole pond. This afternoon the temperature was close to 70 degrees so we put up the outside Christmas decorations. It is much nicer to put up the decorations before the temperature drops so I put them up on the first warm weekend after Thanksgiving.

Tadpole Moving Day

Today we started cleaning up all the plants to bring them inside before winter. It was very sad to see how some of them suffered in the early frost last week. A couple of them were beautiful before the frost and now I wonder if they will recover. We didn't finish so we'll be working on more plants tomorrow. There was some fun though. We moved the tadpoles to a larger container for the winter. And boy were there a lot of tadpoles in that small 2 gallon pan. Now they have room to spread out in the 20 gallon container. It is amazing they were all doing so well being so crowded. Now we have to wait about 6 months to see if they survive the winter and grow into frogs next summer.

Elephant Ears Stage a Comeback

After the hard freeze 2 weeks ago the pond area has looked so sad without the Elephant Ears. But they aren't quite done yet, the past 2 weeks have been relatively warm and the Elephant Ears are pushing out new leaves. The leaves are starting to open and some of them look pretty good. Today we'll bring the plants that can't survive the winter into the house or greenhouse. This year it seems the trees had a extra quantity of leaves. It seems to me I have raked more leaves this year than in years past. The ponds are overflowing with Oak, Maple and Elm leaves so today I'll spend some time picking out as many as I can.

Hard Freeze 2 Weeks Early

Our first hard freeze came 2 weeks earlier this year than last year. With over 4 hours of temperatures below 30 degrees last night the Elephant Ears suffered mightily. It is amazing such magnificent plants looked so good yesterday and this morning they look so sad. I am still planning to leave a number of the bulbs in the ground over the winter and see if they come back as good next year. The last picture shows the Elephant ears drooping over the deck rails. The small pan with the late tadpoles was covered with about an eighth of ice this morning which isn't good for living things so I broke the ice as soon as I noticed it. Tomorrow I'll move the tadpoles to a larger contained where they should stand a better chance to survive the winter since it doesn't look like they will mature anytime soon.
The temperature in the greenhouse I finished a month ago was about 47 degrees this morning so it should work out well this winter.

Confused Clematis Blooms in November

What a beautiful suprise this week, a Clematis bloomed. This flower that grows on a vine usually blooms in the spring and summer and seeing it in November was quite a suprise. Especially since our earlier blooms started out great but died off very fast. Maybe this is a preview that means next years blooms will really impress.