Despite increasingly frosty temperatures some plants in the garden seem unable to resist the urge to keep growing and are lending a whole new meaning to the idea of “evergreen”. Usually by now have extolled the virtues of evergreen foliage in the garden: how essential it is for structure and color particularly through the winter months. But we haven’t had the chance (aside from needing needles for holiday wreaths) to fully appreciate it yet. I won’t give away the oddly timed bloomers before Garden Bloggers Bloom Day on the 15th, but I can show you some examples of new growth, lingering fall color, and even prematurely swollen buds.

Apart from grousing about the weirdness of the weather and worrying over the plants that are headed towards winter in a very vulnerable state, you won’t catch me complaining. Part of me is anxious for the cold to hit but it’s the same part that knows I won’t be quite ready for it when it comes.

Because we’re still growing too. Even though the shading hasn’t been etched off the greenhouse yet (frost – snow even – is what does it) the plants are thriving and we’ve started taking another round of cuttings from the cuttings we took back in September. I feel like I’m just doing that because I can’t not, but actually, growing in the greenhouse doesn’t stop for winter and this work is all part of our normal cycle. We’ll take cuttings from these cuttings when the sun climbs over the greenhouse roof again in late February and March.

Are any of your plants still growing? Are you having a hard time knowing when to quit too?

After Tropical Storm Irene stripped the color from so many trees around here back in August I was pretty pessimistically convinced that fall color would be lousy this year. And maybe that’s why it has seemed especially spectacular. There’s less of it to be sure, and it was more sudden and fast passing than usual (maybe because there’s less of it) but the reds seem deeper and the yellows and oranges more intensely glow-y.

New England fall is a gift. The leaves from our deciduous forests and gardens, colorful or not, are a huge bonus. I still can’t believe anyone would bag them up as garbage. I love the look of freshly fallen leaves carpeting the ground, and the renewable resource dust-to-dust cycle of nature really appeals to my inner lazy gardener. But of course there’s nothing lazy about leaving the leaves. Almost all of us who keep them from the landfill, at least pick them up and put them back down someplace else. It’s how we participate in the cycle.

At home I rake what few leaves fall in my yard straight into my garden beds. This gives critters like spiders, bumblebees and butterflies a place to overwinter. The plants don’t mind and aren’t smothered. (No oaks leaves fall in my yard – they have more of a tendency than any other to form an impenetrable mat.) Come spring, all I need to do is make sure the crowns of plants peek out. Other gardeners also rake extra leaves into piles. Gail says that by spring her pile of whole leaves is as soft and half decomposed as if it had been shredded – perfect for mulching her beds with. Still others mow the leaves. Leaves left in a thin enough layer that the grass still shows will provide nutrients for a healthier lawn. If the clippings are bagged, they may be used as nitrogen-rich mulch in the garden.

Here we do a bit of all three. Fred and Dan make a first pass over the property with mowers and graciously dump the clippings in the vegetable bed. They also blow the leaves off of the lawns and vacuum them up truckload by truckload. This year we realized that the vacuum did a good enough job of shredding the leaves that we saved several days and gallons of gas not passing them through the leaf shredder. The pile has already settled quite a bit and Gail and I have mulched all of the Display Garden beds to save weeding them later.

I know I ask this every year, but please refresh my memory – what do you do with your leaves?

(click on pictures for larger view)

It’s almost 70 degrees outside, the air is feather-soft, the sky is blue-blue and the sun has that golden, get-under-your-eyelids slant. It’s the kind of day that absolutely insists that we get outside. We should be looking for fall color and reindeer moss, or sitting back against a warm wall with our eyes closed, or propping up fallen seedheads…

I had to look up Indian summer to see if this would officially qualify and it must. The definitions say that it’s that spell of warm weather after frost and right before the ground freezes solid and snow covers everything. It’s also the thaw that comes later in the winter – January or February – that feels so much like spring. Perfect time for an Indian raid evidently, which explains the name. According to Wikipedia, other countries call it things like “Old Ladies’ Summer”, “Little summer of the quince”, “Golden October”; and “a tiger in autumn”. (I have to say, I like those names better.)

We’ve had frost – we even had a dusting of snow – but it hasn’t been cold enough to do absolutely everything in (maybe because of this Old Ladies’ summer we’re having.) It’s been interesting to note the survivors particularly among the annuals. The lettuce in the raised bed is perky as ever; borage is fine and so is most of the nicotiana, agastache, and the salvias. What Dahlias were left in the ground went not in the snow surprisingly, but over a cold night a couple of days after that. Unfortunately we had to take most of the other annuals out – particularly in the cutting garden and North Garden – and I would have liked to see which were the ones made of tougher stuff. Some of my neighbors still have zinnias blooming… What annuals survive the first frosts in your garden?

I hope you’re outside right now (if you’re having this perfectly lovely Indian summer too) taking the opportunity to futz in the garden, lie back in the chaise, or collect bouquets of leaves. Come to think of it, what the heck am I doing still sitting in front of this comput—