I have nothing to whine about because the weather has been so nice. I am gardening from sunup until sunset and then cleaning up in the last light until it's dark. It's the cats who complain. They usually eat at sunset and now they have to wait. They lay on towels watching me prune. I have a huge pile of cut canes taking up half the driveway waiting to go to the greenwaste this Saturday. And I still have the back garden to do tomorrow. Then comes the digging and moving. They are all waking up and the buds are starting to grow. Our Winter was really short. Did we even have a winter? Maybe just a few frosty nights that made the lawns and roofs icy white. That was after the few rainy days we had in December. I brought the gardenias and fuchsias under cover for a week. The peach is already blooming. This is early even for this early peach. It will try to ripen the fruit before the warm days are here and all the peaches will never get sweet and be bitter like last year. I hoped for cold days to delay blooming by at least 2 or 3 weeks. It's a race to get plants trimmed and moved before any rain comes and makes the clay soil wet and heavy. I should have done it sooner but I delayed, trying to time it differently in case the winds that ruined my 2013 spring flush return in 2014. Warm winds will blow again in the next few days and by Monday we'll be back in the 80s . I was enjoying these last roses until the winds roughed them up. They look worn on the outer petals but still smell pretty. The ones that come in the overcast days are big and rich in color. Camellias are starting to be covered in blossoms now and salvias from seed show their first flowers to happy hummingbirds. I am enjoying these first japonicas and wonder if rains will have me covering the late season ones. I don't mind if rains have me scrambling to cover the plants because we all need the water so badly. It was a near perfect season for the sasanquas. There is a chance we could get some rain later this month. I would love that because I like to move large roses right before a rain when the humidity is high. The only complaint I will have is if it gets windy tomorrow when I want to finish pruning the really big roses or on Saturday when I have to get mulch after driving the trimmings to the greenwaste. I hate it when the mulch blows in my face and hair while I'm shoveling it out of the trailer but wind or no, it's going to get done.

Sounds like fun with the new addition to the family Trudi!! You'll have to take photos of snow to post and remind me of what it looks like. Today we were at 15C (60F) and were getting hit by another 'weather bomb' with high winds and over 120mm (5 inches) of rain. We had a similar system go through last Monday/Tuesday. Amazing how the Gulf Stream can affect our weather to the point that you folks south of us are getting more winter-like conditions than we are. Still can't really get into the winter sowing feeling - maybe a few flakes would do the trick? :O)

BKay, is that Squash Casserole? I don't think it looks too bad myself. Mine is still clinging to its color, and now we have some warmer nights again. However, with the sun lower in the sky and only a few weeks before first day of winter, I'm thinking the sun won't have the effect it had during its high-in-the-sky days. I figured out during the summer that my problem was not keeping the hosta away from sunlight IN THE SUMMER. No, it was KEEPING THEM IN THE SHADE in the WINTER. So now is the time I'm supposed to be raising the shadecloth over them. The hosta garden is over ankle deep in dead pecan leaves, which I must blow away before I get crowded in with shade cloth. My cloth is the 90% shadecloth, so it is very effective. Babka, the fact you get no frost and have to contrive a dormancy for your hosta is amazing to me. Have you tried a ceiling fan to circulate air in your atrium? A tub of ice, a fan blowing cold air over them, I mean, any old port in a storm. Note: I am ringing the bark of my smallest pecan tree to kill it. I plan to do something similar to the next pecan tree as well. But it will have to be taken out in pieces, hopefully by the young man who did the 25 fioot pine stump earlier this summer. He did not harm a single hosta. Dormancy is a good time to do the dirty work in the garden. The house is all to pieces, the rest of the lawn is too with lumber and construction crew compressing the ground, and the hosta garden is all brown looking, so why not do ALL the messy stuff and be done with it.

A special messenger of autumn showed up on a plant under my kitchen window yesterday. It's a long-haired chartreuse caterpillar the size of my little finger, and he was looking for a place to build his winter home. He has a little black 'tail' and black tufts along with black dots along his body. Now he has scaled a nine-foot stucco wall to just under the fascia board and is resting. I don't see any others. (He may have been delivered along with a big yellow mum brought to my front step by a friend.) I think he will become a very plain moth, but he's absolutely gorgeous now.