The Distracted Gardener

Last Sunday was a beautiful crisp, sunny day - the perfect day to finally finish putting the garden to bed for the winter and planting those red-and-white tulip bulbs I bought in celebration of Canada's 150th birthday next year.

Problem is, I find it very hard to cut back plants or clean out planters when flowers are still blooming. So instead of grabbing the gardening gloves and shovel and trowel, I grabbed the camera.  And photographed every flower I could find in the garden.

Geraniums

Lavender

Roses

Shasta Daisies

I can't remember this one and I'm too lazy to look it up.

Some were pretty much over - the fuschias and mums and hydrangea -
but still too pretty to destroy.

And the Winter Jasmine has been in full bloom since early November.
It doesn't get pruned until spring.

When I finished that, I did some pruning on a pyramid cedar by my carport - it is forever blocking out my house number on the carport post, and was also beginning to push under the soffit and to dislodge the downspout.  After a few minutes with the loppers and garden shears,  I decided 'What the heck, let's cut it back into a shrub'  - and out came the reciprocating saw and electric hedge trimmer. Bzzzzz.... in a matter of minutes I had a nicely rounded shrub and enough cedar boughs to........oh.....yes.....enough cedar boughs to make CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS!

You can see where this is going, right?  The dying flowers did not get removed,  the raspberry canes did not get cut back, the leaves did not get raked, and the bulbs did not get planted.  Instead, I made two outdoor hanging baskets with cedar boughs, cones, holly and a little ribbon - one for the back porch and one for outside my kitchen window.

Why pay $30 or more at the store when I can have all this for free?

Then I decorated the newly-created cedar shrub with outdoor lights - and hung a string on the maple in the front yard for good measure.  As I was clearing up the remaining cedar boughs, to be used on my patio boxes over the holiday season, I eyed the four foot section I had lopped off the top of the pyramid cedar and thought...hmmm....Christmas TREE!

Not bad for something that would I would have just hauled to
the compost at the landfill - and now I can put it out for chipping
when the Christmas trees are picked up around town! 

So much for gardening.  I still hope to get the bulbs planted (at the very least in some pots, if not in the ground), but the rest of the cleanup may wait until spring.  Because the very next morning, Mother Nature laughed at me by sending the temperature plummeting and adding a skiff of snow.  At least it made the hanging baskets pretty.

Mother Nature finished the decorating!

We're supposed to get a much larger dump of snow tomorrow ("much larger" in Crofton means 4-5 centimeters, not enough to build an igloo or even a snowperson),  and the cold is supposed to hang around for another week or two. A good time to edit photos for the next blog entry, methinks.