It is finally feeling like fall around here, though we don't have much color yet.
I am enjoying the mums that I bought from the local FFA boys. They were a little battered in transit, but I planted them, anyway, and they are lovely (if a little one-sided).
The lettuce in the raised beds is coming along. We have enough young leaves for a salad. I planted spinach, too, but it's still tiny. Pretty soon, I'll need to construct some sort of cover for those beds to keep the frost off the plants.
I think I told you about the elephant ears that my sister gave me, the ones I never planted. Just laid them on the ground near the spot where I intended to plant them, but never got around to it. They laid there on top of the ground all winter last year, and all this year, and when I discovered them on my first trip around the yard this spring, I figured they were goners. But not only did they survive and produce leaves, they actually bloomed. Not one bloom, but SIX. I've never had an elephant ear produce more than one bloom, even when planted in the ground!
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Five spent blooms, one emerging bloom.
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I still haven't prepared the vegetable garden for next year. A couple of weeks ago, we cleaned up the old plants, removed the tomato cages, etc., and I scattered 200 pounds of pelletized lime on the soil. As I will trying to work it into the soil, the tiller tire came off the rim. We took the tire off, and I took it to a gas station to be repaired, and by the time we attempted to put it back on the tiller, it was flat again. I don't know what I'm going to do about this. I tried to find a solid rubber tire that wouldn't go flat, but they apparently don't exist. The guy at the hardware store said to put a tube in the old tire. Can that even be done?
