The last of this year’s dahlias has managed to bloom. In the third week of October. We’ll ignore the fact that by all rights, we should have had our first frost ages ago, and this plant would have been toast.
This one was a happy surprise. It had come in a set – Lady Darlene and Mingus Alex. I thought Lady Darlene was red, and Mingus Angus was yellow tipped. When I was transplanting these into pots earlier this spring, I managed to snap the stems of Mingus Angus, and it didn’t survive. (It limped along for a few month with a single leaf, but that finally died.) I was bummed – I really did buy that set for the yellow tipped flower. So I was thrilled when this bloomed, and I found out I had mislabeled which one was which in my notes.
In other news, I’m a little annoyed that I didn’t get a before picture, but our neighbor had an arborist come in and clean up the white pine in the southeast corner of our yard. It’s the last tree in a line that used to extend between our neighbor’s yard and the house behind both our yards (lucky buggers have a double lot). It had a bunch of saplings growing up through the main tree, and you can see all the bittersweet in the foreground.
I’ve had this on my to do list for a while – I really want someone to come in and dig out that whole mound. So this at least takes care of the part of it not on my property. We only have one sapling left on our side to take care of, and then we have to address those vines – probably a good project for next spring.
I feel like I need to address this year’s weather. It’s been bizarre. It’s rained a ton, including a lot of the weekends. I know our day trips to find interesting places for flowers have suffered – I have never had to include “will there be tons of mud?” into my planning as often as I did this year. And the plants have suffered. The fall foliage season is decidedly meh. What’s bloomed and when has been all over the place.
I feel very lucky that my garden’s done as well as it has – and that’s not necessarily saying much. The lateness of the dahlias blooming is just one of the things I’ve dealt with this year, and I’ve been lucky – the immediate drop off behind the house has saved that back garden – we actually have drainage. So we’ll see how long things last until frost, and I’m definitely not going to take many lasting lessons from what happened this year. It’s not like I can plan for unusually wet weather up front.