An End-of Fall Perennial Garden

Another year, another perennial garden season comes to a close.  We've had several killing frosts by now, so all the flowers except for a few mums have died.  Thanks to a very warm October, I feel I finally got caught up on my garden chores.  Almost everything has been cut back now except for a half of one large bed, the fence line, and a little bit up by the house.  I know that must still sound like a lot to you, but it's really not.  I never get everything cut back in the fall because there is never enough time before the snow flies, so something is always left for spring.  And that's ok, by March or April if it's a warm day and the snow has melted, I'm anxious to get outside and do something. 

This is the time of year when I'm really grateful I have bushes in my yard.  They provide so much color with their foliage and berries.

This is the same bush as the one pictured above, but seen farther away.  

View looking west with my back to my own house looking at my neighbors house.  The yard has been raked now, the leaves were mulched and bagged ready to be put on next year's vegetable garden.

View of the western hosta garden looking up at meh house and enclosed vegetable garden.

I thought the trees in my yard had a lot of color this year.  They were more colorful in person than in the photos.  That is an Autumn Blaze maple behind a Burning Bush.

This is the first year my Burning Bush provided so much color.  Hubby moved it to a sunnier location because it was in the way of his landscaping project.  Wow! What a difference it made.  I didn't even think it would survive the move, but it thrived!

Yellow Maples behind the pine tree.

I leave the dried Hydrangea blooms on the stems until spring.  They provide so much winter interest in the garden.

Another view of the Autumn Blaze Maple,

This is a wild Black Eyed Susan that loves to reseed in my yard.  Sometimes I pull it out, because it can spread fast like a weed.  And sometimes I just leave it, because it is so pretty.  This year, it produced abundantly and looked so beautiful.  However, next year I may regret not pulling it out.  😆

The most disappointing part of this summer was we never finished our landscaping project.  We try and do one landscaping project a year, but this one is just taking a lot longer than expected.  Oh well, it took me five years to finish the western Hosta hill, this one might take as long too, but it'll be beautiful when we're done.  

It was a hill of wood retaining walls.  They were twenty five years old and just started to rot away.  The steps were also wood and were unsafe to walk on anymore.  So hubby has been pulling out the old retaining walls and building new ones.  The new ones will be covered in steel.  He also put in stone steps and is created walking paths between the walls so I will have more raised gardens to work in.  That is important as I'm not getting any younger. 

 And that is the very last garden post of the season!  

Have A Great Day!  Amy

Linking Up with these Fabulous Blogs HERE!

My Fall Perennial Garden and Final Fall Vegetable Harvest

I know this post is a little late as we have had our first killing frost a few weeks ago and my garden no longer looks like this, but I thought you'd rather see it late than not at all.  

Let's begin the fall garden tour shall we?

Black-Eyed Susans and Hydrangeas are the stars of the fall perennial garden.

My Polka Dotted plant did so well this year!  I always save a bit of this plant and bring it indoors for the winter, and in the spring I set it inside a planter.  It always performs so much better outdoors than indoors.  I also tried Strawflower for the first time this year (that's the yellow plant in the photo below).  Wow! What an amazing plant that turned out to be.  The leaves are like paper, so the deer leave it alone.  It grew so huge and beautiful for me too!

I always plant a Black-Eyed Susan vine by my front porch as it does really well there.  This one is a purple/pink variety.  I love the way it naturally wraps itself around the post.

This coleus amazed me this year.  I took cuttings of it before the frost so I could grow it again next year. Taking cuttings save me big $$$ in the spring because I don't have to buy new plants.  If you've never done cuttings before it's super easy!  Just cut a stem below a leaf node and put it in a glass of water in a sunny windowsill.  In a few weeks, it will develop roots and you can plant the cutting in a pot!

I also really love the silver foliage plant and took cuttings of that one as well.  I never tried the silver plant before.  I loved how it performed!

I was blown away by the vibrancy of this single Purple Coneflower.

Sedum Autumn Joy, a must have in any fall perennial garden.

Another variety of sedum.  This one has a purplish leaf.

This year I grew sunflowers in my vegetable garden to feed the birds.  The fence kept the animals out so the squirrels and deer wouldn't eat them before they went to seed;  although I did catch one sneaky squirrel inside my garden a few times!

At my feet is a a planter of the new Tri-Colored Mum.  You will have to watch the short video below to hear and see more about this mum.  On the other side of my feet is a new Rudebekia I tried this year.  The nursery said it's a perennial, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Just look at all the sunflower seeds inside one sunflower head!  Amazing!

When the sunflower heads were ready, I chopped them off leaving enough stem so I could tie it to the bird feeder.

Last year I had a huge problem with Japanese Beetles coming into my vegetable garden because they were attracted by the Marigolds and Petunias.  So I googled what annuals Japanese Beetles don't eat, and lantana was one of them.  I tried it, and they were right!  The beetles were not interested in this flower at all.  And the added benefit to me was that these turned out to be great plants!  They're drought tolerant, maintenance free, and absolutely GORGEOUS!

We had a bumper crop of potatoes this year.  This one large table doesn't even show all the potatoes we harvested, I filled up two more tables with potatoes.  Of course, when I laid the paper down over the potatoes to cure, Jackson had to sit right on top of them. 😂

We also had a bumper crop of squash.  This is what the vines looked like when the squash is ready to harvest.  Be sure to watch the short video below to see more squash!

Growing tomatoes in a short growing season like Wisconsin is always tough because most of them don't have the time to ripen before frost.  But this year, nothing went to waste, for I even picked my green tomatoes!  I made Fried Green Tomatoes for the first time and I couldn't believe how delicious they were.  I followed this recipe HERE.

I also canned them to use in recipes which use Salsa Verde.  This was a lot more work than canning regular tomatoes for the skins of green tomatoes don't come off easily, but I'm glad I did it because it felt to know that nothing went to waste in my garden.  I followed this recipe HERE.

Finally, I have to share my new Amazon purchase that I just love:  a decorative, yet practical kitchen compost bin!  I can't tell you how much I love this!  Prior to owning this, I kept my compost inside a coffee tin in the refrigerator.  It was such a pain to pull it out every time I had to dump food scrapes in it.  This Amazon compost bin sits attractively in my kitchen and it includes a charcoal filter so it never smells.  It's pretty, easy to use, and so much more practical than a coffee tin.  You can find it HERE.

And now, be sure to watch these short videos of the Tri-Colored Mum, how I dry my oregano, and see all the squash I had growing on my fence!

 Have A Great Day!  Amy

Linking Up with these Fabulous Blogs HERE!

My Late Fall Garden and My Favorite New Garden Recipes

Although I am sad to report the garden seasoning is over,  I am thrilled to say that due to a very warm fall I completed all my fall garden chores!  Usually the cold and snow sneaks up on me so fast that I can't even finish chopping everything down;  but not this year!  I got everything done, so I won't have to be doing fall chores in the spring.

This will be the last gardening post of the year.  If I have a beautiful snow fall and I'm thinking the garden looks stunning with the fresh fallen snow, I may take photos of the garden in winter;  but that will be 2023.

This is what my garden looks like after every last flower has finished blooming, and before everything is cut down to the ground.

Even if all the fresh beauty has faded, I'm always awestruck with how pretty and colorful the garden can still look in the fall.

There are layers of fall color in the fall garden, from the yellowing leaves of the Asiatic Lilies to the colorful leaves in the forest beyond the garden gate.

Both my husband and I were stunned the way our bushes produced so much fall color this year.  We usually only expect trees to give us fall foliage, but bushes can also provide fall color.

The bright orange bush below is one of my garden favorites.  It provides interest all season long.  In the spring it has yellow flowers, in the summer it has green foliage, in the fall it looks like this, and in the winter it is covered in red berries.  Just don't ask me the name.  I have no idea. 😉

These yellow leaves are from a lilac bush.

And this yellow bush is a Viburnum.

The photo below is what the garden looks like when everything but the bushes have been cut down to the ground.  I'm so happy to have my work done for the year.  It leaves me with such a great sense of satisfaction knowing I won't be overwhelmed with extra work come spring.

I had a little feral friend come to visit me while I was gardening.  He wouldn't come close enough to me to let me pet him, but he was sure interested in my water bottle.

This little guy I almost stepped on while walking back to the house.  We have so many frogs in our yard!  Good! Eat those snails and slugs boys!

I was harvesting broccoli right up unto frost.  The plants would not stop producing!  I finally just got tired of picking broccoli everyday and processing it, so I ripped up the plants.  I know, it seems wasteful, but I have a chest freezer full of broccoli now, I have no idea if we will even be able to eat it all.  

And now, I want to share some favorite summer recipes I loved!  

In the spring, we went Blueberry picking and we gathered enough blueberries to fill four gallon freezer bags.  I made several desserts and muffins, and put blueberries in all my smoothies, and I still have three gallon freezer bags left over.  These blueberries should be enough to last me the rest of the winter for sure!

Blueberry Peach Crisp

I have never made a Blueberry Peach Crisp before so I decided to give it a try.  

I love the way peaches and blueberries look together.  So pretty.  I liked this recipe, but honestly, it was a bit too sweet for my taste.  I think I will either stick to Apple Crisp or try and find a recipe with less sugar. If you're interested in making this recipe, you can find it HERE.

                       Zucchini "Apple" Crisp

Like most gardeners, I always have a surplus of zucchini, and, I always manage to find some gigantic zucchini that I somehow missed that has grown into the size of a caveman club.  Most people just feed those extra-large zucchini to the chickens or toss them in the compost bin, but I actually found a recipe that uses those club-size zucchini:  "Mock Apple Crisp"

I had my doubts when making this recipe.  Everyone said it tasted "just like apple crisp".  So I decided to give it a try, and you know what?  It does taste just like apple crisp.  My husband loved it and said, "Why ever make apple crisp again, if you can make it out of zucchini?  It's a lot cheaper!"

The trick is slicing the zucchini to look like apple slices and cooking the zucchini in lemon juice.  The zucchini absorbs the lemony flavor giving it a tart like taste you'd find in apples.  It truly is amazing!  And the best part is, the recipe uses 8 CUPS of Zucchini!  It's a great dish to make if you have a lot of zucchini.

You can find this recipe HERE!

       Chocolate Chip Zucchini Banana Muffins

This next recipe also uses zucchini and I found it on Instagram HERE, from Half Baked Harvest.  That lady can cook!  How she stays so skinny eating all this delicious food I have no idea. 

I thought these muffins were quite tasty and nutritious since they are low sugar, and use both zucchini and bananas, but I didn't think they were sweet enough, which is funny since I usually think most baked goods are too sweet.  She uses honey instead of sugar in her recipe, so maybe that is why.  I even added the extra honey she recommended if you like a sweeter taste, plus I made the honey butter, and it still wasn't very sweet.  BUT, I still liked them, it was the chocolate chips that sold me!

                   Blueberry Oatmeal Cookies

During blueberry picking season, I found this recipe in my electric coop magazine and they looked so scrumptious I decided to make them.  Wow! Were these good!  Both my hubby and I loved them, and I think as far as cookies go, they are pretty healthy too!  Unfortunately, because the recipe was in a magazine, I lost it 😢 but I found THIS ONE on Pinterest that looks pretty similar.

 I hope you enjoyed my last garden post for the year!  Now it's time to relax by the fire and dream of next years garden.

Have A Great Day!  Amy

Linking Up with these Fabulous Blogs HERE!