Winter is knocking at the door

"Winter is an etching, Spring a watercolor, Summer an oil painting

And fall is a mosaic of them all. "

Stanley Horowitz

This is a daphne I got from Rick lupp about a decade ago, it's been doing it's thing for a long time in my scrubby medditeranean border, which is really just an overgrown herb garden. Funny it had its best bloom ever this fall. Harbinger of something to come?

Oxalis hirta
I started collecting the South Africans again, because I love them, I just hope I can get them through the winter

Oxalis hirta
This seems like a good color form of this wonderful little South African species. This year is a hardiness test as I think we are going to be much colder then the last few. 

This has been an interesting fall, we had some early frost but it wasn't very hard, this evening's forecast shows lows down in the high 20's and this week has temps down into the mid 20's which always means a few degrees colder for me up here at 620' ( the salem airport where the weather forecasts are closer to 230')

I'm buttoning up the greenhouse and putting frost blankets down on the South African stuff tonight but long term I think I need to add a little heated section that I can at least take the edge off of a hard frost with. Most of the autumn bloomers have finished up now and a few of the winter growers are throwing up leaves but for the most part is pretty quiet in the garden. The leaf show has been great this season with a nice long week of clear cold weather we got to see some fantastic fall colors.

Cold and clear is the forecast this week and I'm sure we will see the lowest lows of the year.

cheers,

Mark

The First Frost.......well almost

So the weather folks were talking about frost all weekend and into the week, there was this big cold front moving in that they swore if it had been December we would have had snow here for sure. Well it did snow in the mountains and I'll say it did seem early for snow up there and even in Bend. I brought in plants to the greenhouse, tucked away the tropicals from the patio, put out some blankets on a few things, and scrambled to get the rest of the tomatoes into the pantry. 

On Tuesday we had a little bit of ice on the windshield and and the roof, but it really hadn't settled onto the lawn even and you certainly couldn't call it a hard frost at all. But the harbingers of an early winter and possibly a harder one then we have seen in a good while certainly to seem to be blowing in with that crisp north wind that has prevailed the better part of 4 days now. 

Crocus cartwrightianus 'Marcel'

The autumn crocus bloom continues unabated, although the lack of sunshine the last few days have had most of them closed up.

47 and Raining now, more rain in the forecast the next few days,

Mark