The Roost Is Still A'Bloom

by Pa Rock

Farmer in Autumn

The Ozarks are now several weeks into autumn, the season when everything, creatures and plants, begin to hunker down for the winter.   A few leaves have fallen but most remain on their branches soaking up the ever more slanting rays of the sun as the days turn cooler and shorten.  They will be vibrant with fall colors in a couple of weeks and then begin falling en masse. The grass has basically quit growing for the season, but I will give it one more good mowing when the leaves are down.  My neighbors tediously rake, and burn, and blow their leaves about, but I much prefer the simplicity and good environmental practice of mulching mine with the mower.

All of the flowers that I put out last spring are still blooming, thanks in no small part to the hundreds of gallons of water that I carried to them throughout our very dry summer - and thanks also to the fact that we have yet to have our first frost of the season.  When Jack finally shows, the flowers will die overnight and I will remove them the next day.  My flower-and-gnome-circus out in front of the house will be replaced that day with a bird-feeder-and-gnome-circus.

I planted five roses this past spring, and had amazing results.  This has been my best rose-growing season ever.   Early in the spring I purchased two standard red rose plants at Costco and planted them next to the deck in the backyard.  But those "standard" roses turned out to be climbers, and though they had no trellis this year, they each produced canes that were taller than I am - and had beautiful red flowers all season long.

A few weeks later I purchased three hybrid roses from a local supplier and paid more than twice per plant over what I had given for the Costco roses - but I was in a mood and wanted to plant some roses, so the cost be damned.  Those three roses - a "Frida Kahlo" and a "Fun in the Sun" and an "Arctic Blue" struggled through an awful drought this summer as well as an infestation of Japanese beetles, but they survived and thrived.  Today they are three of the healthiest plants at The Roost, and their almost constant blooms are the envy of the neighborhood.   I guess you really do get what you pay for.

But in just a couple of weeks all of those wonderful blooms of summer - along with the leaves on the trees - will be gone.

And then I will mulch all of that dead vegetation and hunker down by the fire to await the rebirth of the spring!