it's indian summer, let's keep it going

we have been so lucky the last few weeks. the weather has been wonderful, not hot and not cold with many days around 68 and some sun. we've had little rain and after all of the wet weather we had earlier this year, it was a nice break. as of today, we still have not had a true hard frost and our garden is still producing lettuce, greens of all kinds, peas and the cauliflower will hopefully produce heads soon too.

here's a look at what is still going on in the yard:

my crazy christmas cactus is always covered in blooms before thanksgiving!

they are so pretty while they last

this pineapple sage is still going strong and if the bees are out, they flock to it.

the moss is filling in the patio nicely

as the season progresses, i will fill in the gaps

the leaves are finally in the corral, or near it if you want to be technical

sugar bear is growing her winter coat and she looks a little plump, but it is all fur!

our new bell by the back door

leafing it up again...

it's that time again...i'm sad to see the summer go but then again, it wasn't much this year. we had so much rain and cool weather that it never really felt like summer to me. now we move on to fall and all of the fun tasks it brings. what would that be you ask, in a word, leaves. we collect them all every year and use them for composting and mulching.

after 5 years of doing this by hand on a 2/3acre lot, we broke down and bought a blower/mulcher/vac to aid in the process. here is darry blowing the leaves into a pile so i can begin raking them up. most of the leaves he is blowing aren't from our trees. this gully is part of the storm drain system that runs through our neighborhood and leaves from the trees across the street seem to collect here. while it is annoying to have to clean up some other person's leaves, we get to keep them and compost them.

we still have to get them to the corral and we use a barrel to do it

darry's new toy. we wanted one of the back pack models but just couldn't pay the $300 it would have cost us.

the long walk uphill to the corral. look for the soccer net in the top right corner, the corral is right next to it.

the leaf corral

the compost pile. we use open pits and we have 4 different stages going at once. this is the first stage and we cover it with the leaves that we collect. consider composting leaves for your garden, it beats sending them to the land fill!!!