More mid October color

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This is the Virginia Creeper from about 10 days ago.  I cut it way back to about 3.5 feet up its pole, in the Springtime.  It has grown right up to the top again and is putting on some gorgeous autumn color.  I used the old dead twigs to line the woodland path and the composted dirt from the cleanup as compost in the woodland at the back.  I am finished cleaning up this woodland area and have transplanted 12 perennials and some daffodils, hyacinths, tulips into the area. 

this is looking over my back fence at the sumacs in a neighbor's back yard. The reddish tree on the left is my Japanese cedar that goes this interesting bronze/red color for the winter.  The area under this tree is cleaned up, but the compost I had did not extend to under this tree.  I have self seeding perennials in this part of the woodland.  I am not sure if too much compost added would be good for them.  I cleaned out 4 bags of compost from the old compost bin, but I think I will be using it on the vegetable garden patch.  I think the soil there needs to be beefed up so things grow.

The sweet gun tree is starting to show a bit of color in this photo of about a week ago.  It should be really nice in a few days.  We have had a light frost or two and more rain.

My light garden is looking ok.  All the African violets are in bloom.  The little magenta dendrobium has a couple of flowers.
I have been making soups.  I tried a ratatouille recipe.  I am not a big fan of food with tomatoes, but this was delicious.  Today I made a salmon chowder and it had tomatoes in it as well.  Was good, too.

mid October color

The Autumn colors are looking terrific.  It has been raining for the last couple of days... not all the time, but enough to put an inch of water into the rain gauge.   Since I am mostly finished my Fall clean up, I can play with my photos.  I hope you can see the rain drop trails in the top photo.  The second one is the coreopsis in its container next to the bird bath.  The bottom one is of a willow I somehow got horn-swaggled into buying at the Rock and Alpine garden show and sale this spring.  Its an interesting story.  Not everyone gets treated to the generosity of a Count... I think that is his actual title.  As I shopped at the sale at the show, I chose a few choice plants ... lewisias if I remember correctly... from on the table, and put them into my tray to buy.  Lo and behold, this man came to my tray, grabbed the lewisias and said 'those are mine'.  I meekly said, 'you can't take my plants!'.  He said, they were in my tray, I just left them on the table while I talked to someone... I suppose it is my own fault' he muttered.  and proceeded to give me these willows, because I had said I was looking for one particular miniature willow.  Well, I must say, after talking to him and saying that he did not have to give me his plants, it was just as much my fault for taking his stuff, I was very generously compensated for the loss of the lewisias I had chosen.  I also learned a lot about the plants.  This was a very enthusiastic plantsman, and truly of some Royal designation, as I found from reading the newsletter, later.  Our city is populated by all kinds of people who find it to be a paradise. .. from rock stars to royalty.  We let them alone to live a normal life, too, it seems.  Life is good on the left coast.
The colors of Autumn are changing very quickly.  Sometimes the light is amazing... I don't think I could capture it with my cameras.  As we had dinner tonight, I watched out the dining room window, as the light faded from the glow on the leaves and color in the sky to grey and black in a matter of minutes.  It was truly marvelous.  And so was the conversation over dinner.  Just as an aside, I think a civilized and interesting dinner hour is wonderful.  I am definitely blessed.
I spent quite a bit of time on Megashot, today.  This was fun, too.  The site is quite fast.  I believe Cyrus is working like crazy to get Version 2 designed, coded and on line, asap.  There are a few glitches in the site since migration, but as the site will be a lot different on version 2 these things should not matter.  (I can't believe I typed CITY instead of SITE in the above sentence.  Yes, the site is like a city, inhabited by friends and as it grows, by people we only see in passing, through the Explore or the Contests or in members photo uploads, or other places. )
I ran into a small annoyance ... Java wanted to update... well hells bells, everything wants to be updated, constantly.  I said No and googled this Java update thing.  After reading some of the answers to my search saying its a virus... eeeek ... everything is a virus...  I found a site that seemed to me to say what it really is... Java seems to have this checking thing running in the background and asking to be updated.  The people on this site say you can disable this annoyance, and your computer will run faster.  ok... I just left it at "no" for now.  I have no idea what Java does, or why I might need it.  According to the geeks on the site, that I tend to believe, it can be disabled with no loss but with an improvement to speed of the cpu.

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.