Winter Color
I hope everyone was warm for Thanksgiving! We had a small pre-Thanksgiving get together yesterday with my son and his family. My daughter and her family were out at the deer lease. We will have our Thanksgiving feast next week. This is the one holiday that we end up rescheduling the most often. There is hunting season to contend with along with extended families and getting everyone together is much more important than the actual date. For us it will be next week.
In the meantime we have been busy here. We have added our winter color which this year meant also adding lots of cactus. I love cactus and most of these beauties went into garden tubs that I have a horrible time remembering to water. Cactus makes perfect sense for those spaces. In addition, we replaced a large cactus plant that kept trying to take over Ron's barbequing space with a much more upright yucca plant. Hopefully it will grow up and out but not lean into Ron's space.
We have had two mornings with temperatures below freezing so all the tender plants have withered. The coleus, potato vine, marigolds and the rest of the vegetable plants are now gone. The grasses and roses, which are my favorites, are still with us. Two mornings with freezing temperatures is not nearly enough to take away all the green around us. The ferns still look wonderful which means the back garden still looks lush.
Our landscapers, JMA Living Landscapes, do all our heavy lifting.... literally. They pulled out one of our ornamental plum trees from the back yard and cut back the other. Our backyard was getting so overgrown that it was always dark and there was no grass at all under most of the trees. I don't need a golf course look but some grass is nice.
One of the trees we planted last spring isn't doing well and may need to be replaced. The mulch has been refreshed and the garden walkways are been graveled. Everything looks great for the fall and winter season. Our winter color hasn't bloomed yet but will look increasingly wonderful over the next few weeks.