cool nights

The Thai basil is crowding out the pimiento (I think it was a pimiento ) pepper. My rhubarb is pretty happy too. (note to self: plant more varieties of hot peppers next year.)

The evenings are getting so cold now that I am starting to bring some of my potted plants indoors from their summer sojourn. Maybe I'm not acclimatized myself yet, to the cooler temperatures to come, but I thought it felt positively icy this evening when I let the dogs out for their last bit of business.

In came the hibiscus, fuchsia, Swedish ivy, bay, pelargonium, white sage and rosemary. I should have brought in the Lion's Tale, and the 'ice-cream' pots too, but they are just too heavy. The plants in those big pots will have to be lifted out into smaller pots that I can manage more easily. Then those big pots may be decorated with greenery or simply cleaned out and stored away over the winter -- I haven't decided yet.

What with tidying up the vegetable garden, the raspberry bed, the weeding and mulching I have to do in the existing perennial beds, plus finishing the digging up of the new bed in the back, finding new homes for the recovered bulbs, digging out the vanilla grass and planting it up in the tin tubs with -- hey, some of the bulbs, why not! --...I'm not sure I have enough to do, ha-ha!! Maybe it's time for me to find a garden helper! (am I sounding a little frantic??)

Oh, I also want to see if it's possible to rent a chipper/shredder around here. That would be marvelous for making quick work of the garden refuse and some of the partly decomposing stuff already on the compost pile. Ahhh. A gardener's gold: mulch! Ok, maybe compost is gold and mulch is ...awfully nice to have lots to put in the garden!