It has been a while since I have posted a gardening update so I thought I would post some pictures I took when I toured the garden recently. My latest gardening post was February 2018 State of the Garden so it has been quite a while since I have posted! As can be expected the garden is in fall mode and many of our plants are losing leaves and others are dying back for the winter. We had a recent bout of wet weather so while I was touring the garden with my son I was pleasantly surprised to see hundreds of mushrooms along our paths. I have no idea what kind they are and my son and I just looked at them (teaching the little one woods skills early) but I was surprised at how many there were, especially since last year we only had a few.
We found a large number of these brown mushrooms along our side yard path and going down the hill. I am pretty sure they sprung up from the mulch we spread last spring which is actually pretty cool if you think about it. We are (ahem) sort of almost done spreading our mulch from the trees we cut down quite some time ago. This fact was not lost on our neighbor who happened to be outside at the same time good naturedly commenting on our lack of finishing the project. I am really tired of tracking in large amounts of dirt and debris which has covered our driveway from the mulch pile but we honestly had no time whatsoever to work on it while both of us were working full time. One of my goals before Thanksgiving is to have this completely taken care of but I also have to do the fall pruning and remove a few large bushes in order for that to happen so I may not get to it until the week of Thanksgiving.
It was neat to see the brown mushrooms in varying states of flower. Some of them had just come up and others were on their way out. My son and I spent quite a bit of time looking them over and talking about them. I should probably buy a mycology book so that we can look up the names of them. The kids would love to learn more about the plants we have.
I thought I would post an embarrassing picture of my side yard. This area of the yard was pretty much ignored this year, including watering so it needs a ton of work. That is actually a picture of the path that we walk through to get to the back yard. It was not quite completely closed but we did get a little bit wet walking through it. I am torn between cleaning it up and completely turning this area to grass. We have hummingbirds that live in our neighbor’s tree that feast of my flowers in this area nearly year-round so I am super hesitant to pull everything out but the bushes are too big for the space so I may take a few out and move the others over to make room for a fence.
We found some more mushrooms under our deck. They were not so cute looking and pretty slimy but they must be tasty because the squirrels have been eating them left and right. My son and I however worked on looking without touching. I don’t know what kind of mushrooms they are and I want our kids to have a healthy fear of eating wild mushrooms since we have so many out in our woods. We have a strict eat mushrooms only from the store policy in our house!
I believe this is a “Smoke Bush” in our backyard. It was so beautiful this year I had to take a picture of it. We inherited this bush and every other year it looked mostly dead and out of place but this year the colors came through and it is gorgeous!
I took a view from below (as we call it) of the woods in the ravine behind our house. As you can see we have a huge English Ivy problem out behind our house. We have been girdling the trees regularly but some of the trees are too far out where the slope is very steep and we are not able to. The tree on the right is slated to be removed at some point since the Ivy goes up into the lower branches and it makes it unsafe.
Stinky Bob is a weed we have all over our yard. It is a native species so I let it grow in the back but every spring it takes over most of our available space near the front of our yard. This is the path down to the ravine from behind our house and it is completely covered. Last spring this area was fir needle covered soil.
We had our first branch down last week and although it scared me, the branch was not really that big in comparison to others we have had down. Luckily this branch missed the deck railing for it’s initial descent and only rested on it after it fell. This particular branch happened to fall when I had the slider open on a sightly windy day to air out the house. I am so glad nobody was standing there when it fell because it came down really fast and we had been outside on the upper deck a few minutes prior. Most of the large branches that fall end up where this one did because they are from the three trees that are right next to the deck. We are having those removed for safety at some point but my lay off has put all projects on hold for a little bit. I am hoping to take out the trees sometime in the spring.
That’s it for our Fall Gardening Update! I have some projects going on in the front yard mostly concerning mulch application and trimming our bushes but even though I have more free time I am still too busy to regularly get out in the garden on nice days.
How is your garden going this fall?