Rock walk

On Oct. 2th the Vancouver Island Rock and Alpine Gardening Society Victoria Natural History Society had a Geology field trip.  The announcement:  "From Metchosin to Swartz Bay, see the evidence of the movement of continents and ice sheets with Atholl Sutherland-Brown, retired Chief Geologist of B.C.
Meet at 9:30 a.m. at Helmcken Park and Ride to carpool. Bring a lunch and drinks
and dress for the weather. Length of outing about five-six hours. No pets."
The weather was cloudy and coolish.  It was a very vigorous walk for me.  Atholl Sutherland-Brown, I understand, is 82 years young.  He tripped across all the rock surfaces with no trouble at all.  At each stop, he described the geology of the area, without referring to notes or maps.  We had notes and maps to follow along with what he said at each of our stops.  I am afraid I missed most of it, as I had to take photos, of course, as well as not being as agile as most of the people.  Here is the first paragraph:  "The geology of the area is complex because three completely different terranes have been thrust together by plate tectonic subduction with the younger ones forced underneath the older."  And it got more complicated, to me, as we went along.  It was very interesting.  I did not take notes.  There was a book mentioned, but I not longer remember the name or author. 
On the third photo I discovered how to take .jpeg photos into the RAW converter of photoshop.  If you are on windows, go into Bridge, right click the photo you want to use, and go to Open in Camera RAW. 
I spent this morning making chicken stock and chicken soup.  Most of the early afternoon I tried to set up a Drop Box account, for on line storage.  I did not get it set up properly, but don't care.  The first 2 GB are free storage.  The next step up for storage space costs $20.00 per month.  It would not take long for me to fill up 2 GB of space, with photos.  I have had near crashes on my hard drive, but have had back up.  ... and now have lots of space and it is all backed up.  I cannot see where I would need the drop box.  Flash drives would work fine for storage, should I ever get antsy about losing my back up drive or the main drive.
In the last week we have had some fine gardening weather.  Although, we had a light frost 2 nights ago.  I have finished cleaning up the woodland, the Japanese area, and under the deck.  The dry shade under the deck needs to be watered more often to extend the moss garden.  While cleaning up the Japanese area I see that the moss garden is coming along quite nicely.  The ferns can get out of hand, though.  I like to leave the Welsh poppies grow.  They are lovely and seem to do ok in the shade.  So, next year, I shall work on extending the moss garden further under the deck, I hope.  I have several different kinds of moss growing.  pictures perhaps in a week or two.
The wasps are no longer alive in there nest under the deck.  The hornets nest has started to deteriorate and they are not on the outside patching it up, so I guess the frost was the end of them. 

October color

The roses are still in bloom.  I have a couple of rose bowels in the house containing the most fragrant Gertrude Jekyl which is a David Austin English rose.

The plants on the deck are about finished blooming.  I have not replaced them with Chrysanthemums or pansies.  I probably won't do this either.  As soon as it rains these plants that look great coming out of the greenhouse turn to brown mush. 

This is the Tibouchina 'Royal Dreams' shrub on the deck.  It has one leaf that has changed color.  This is a very showy plant, but tender.  It has to come into the house over winter.  I shall put it into the library, so that none of the other plants get any outside bugs it may have on it.  It can be pruned back quite a bit, so it bushes out more with more of the Royal Purple blooms on it.  When I bought this one it was a tiny plant in a tiny pot.  It is now about 4.5 feet tall and looking very healthy. 

The michaelmas daisies are in few well behaved clumps all over the garden.  Aside from the tree leaf colors they are the best Autumn plants.  I have seeds saved from some of the plants and hope to put them into pots to grow.  I have some seed from the wild sweet peas that I hope to get growing in the woodland area.  There is poppy seed, delphinium, hollyhock and lily of the Nile.  I have 4 bags of topsoil to put into the pots where I hope to grow these seeds.

This is the firethorn, covered with berries, this year.  The germander is finished blooming and will be cut back in the early Spring.  I like to leave the perennials foliage on over winter.  The robins are going to happy with this feast of berries later on when they ripen. Early Monday morning I was sitting at my front window watching all the birds.  We have the Colquitz river across the street from us.  It is rather wild area that is not made into a 'park'.  Its wonderful habitat for the the wild life. I saw deer in the deer pasture.  There were Canada geese, 2 big blue herons, a whole bunch of robins, tit mouse clumps, and numerous other birds.  In the back the humming birds are constantly at the feeder.  I wonder if they fatten up to over winter here.
I have transplanted my recent purchases of perennials and bulbs.  There are a few good 'butterfly and humming bird' plants.  This woodland area is covered with good mulch.  When I emptied the last bag of this mulch, I found that I have more of it under the bag of fine cedar bark mulch.  So, if I should need some good compost there is a bit there.  There is also the old compost bin to empty, also.  We are to have about a week of perfect gardening weather, so I must get out.

Early Autumn in the garden

This is another view of the renovated path in the back garden. 

The vegetable garden has been weeded and the compost added.  It needs one more bag of compost added.  The Community compost people emptied the bin today and left the needed bag.  I have used up all of the compost so far this year.
The weeding in the woodland garden is finished.  I will need to be very diligent about removing the blue bells when they come up in the Spring.  I have added the butterfly bush next to the black tub.  I have added the woodland compost to the area and have used up all of that compost that was available.  I have put in some daffodil bulbs, a few crocus, hyacinths and dutch iris along the middle ground of this 5 - 6 foot strip of woodland.  The area I am working on stretches from one side of the old garage along behind the garage to about half way past the garage.  I have not measured it, but it must be at least 25 feet.  I have purchased 11 perennials from Cannor, and I hope to put about half of them into this area.  There is a monarda, a veronica, a lychnis (Maltese Cross), Liatrus (gay feather), anise hyssop and a primula that I will add between the bulbs.  These perennials should cover the fading foliage of the bulbs from the spring.  Across the old sidewalk from this area is the lovely lace cap hydrangea under planted with some ... I think its called sweet woodruff and muscari, with some stray daylilies, the lily of the valley shrub, and ferns that hide the old black compost bin.  The compost bin needs to be emptied.  I am adding kitchen compost to it, so it should be good additive to the gardens when I get it dug out. 
Along the front I added 40 more muscari to the crocus field and I should now have a border of blue around the crocuses when they all come up in the spring. I expect to add a lavender, a black eyed susan, and a dwarf coreopsis to the strip next to the crocus field.  I need to keep the daisies under control in this strip and not let them crowd out everything else.  I could use one more pussy toes in the front of this border. 

The apples are not great this year.  I think they are ready to be used now.  I still have apple sauce in the freezer from other years. 
The next area on my to do list is the pond and Japanese garden area.  I need to weed all of the violets and stuff out of the moss garden, dig out some ferns that are taking over, and then think about what I am going to do about the area under the deck.  I want to make a sitting area, so there might have to be some digging and moving of dirt to make the level area. 
The trees are starting to turn colors and the rains have started.  There was over half an inch of rain in the rain gauge.  I saw a weather forecast saying that our winter is going to be colder than usual.  I guess those hornets were right!