It's Snowing!

We're not alone in waking up to snow on the ground today. More snow is falling as I make this post, and the morning weather report indicated that most of the province is getting snow today.

I hope everybody has their bulbs in by now! Soon we'll be stomping around in moon boots and scraping our car windshields...

Movin' On Indoors

The indoor plants should be receiving a little more attention now, since their outdoor counterparts are starting to wilt and wither. On a completely different note from hardy perennials, here are a few of the houseplants doing interesting things today. I started a few peppers indoors in the spring, knowing that our season is not nearly long enough to grow them outside.

This is Ancho "San Luis", which I hope to use in some interesting southwestern cooking when I start feeling creative in a spicy-food-sort-of-way:

Here are two un-named phalaenopsis orchids. The white is having its second bloom since I got it on Mother's day this year.

The yellow one is having it's third bloom in 17 months and appears to have another flower spike growing from its base. I don't know how I got so lucky, but our prairie sun does make the orchids thrive here (that's indoors, of course)!

Big Bulb Planting Day

I think that bulb-planting week should be a provincial, if not national, holiday. I would even be willing to have it as an unpaid holiday. Just so long as I could always get the first week of October off of work to plant tulips and daffodils, I would be pleased. Instead, I crammed most of my bulb planting into this morning. At least the weather was beautiful. In the end, I concluded that I should have planted more bulbs, though I suppose there is some limit to the money I would spend on those papery little imports.

Raised bed in fall colors extravaganza:

This year's order from Botanus was large enough that they threw in a free DVD entitled "Passion - a documentary on the Dutch Bulb Sector". That sounds like one to watch on a romantic evening by the fireplace with RLM! I started watching it this afternoon, but the musical soundtrack was too emotionally intense for both the dog and the littlest gardener, so I had to turn it off.

Scabiosa caucasica "House's Hybrids": a purple bloom from the mix. This flower is always reliable for giving me nice October flowers.


Here is my new planting of Muscari armeniacum, the common blue grape hyacinth. I've read that planting them as "rivers" gives a nice effect. My river is narrow, but meanders gracefully through part of the raised bed.

Otherwise, I've planted various types of tulips including Single Lates, Double Lates, Fosteriana, Giant Beauty, Lily-flowered, and Triumph tulips. I'm also trying Allium atropurpureum this year, to add to A. "Gladiator" and A. Purple Sensation which did well this summer. I also planted a total of 100 yellow daffodils around the raised beds and I look forward to seeing those next spring. I boldly planted Anemone blanda, with the knowledge that it may well not survive the winter here. I'm living on the edge...the edge of my hardiness zone.