A weekly tour of our garden
Well, hello and welcome to our front yard garden here in the South Carolina upstate. Uh, this is one of our last episodes. I’m not sure exactly when we’ll finish up. Uh, but it’s the Halloween day. No, uh, October 31st, 2025. This is our 35th episode for the year. And, um, we are getting potential frost warnings. We have not had a frost yet tonight. Um, we may get one. Uh, they said it it’s going to go down to about 35° in some areas and that may uh get us some frost. We’ll see. Uh, if so, a lot of things that we have will uh kind of die off at that point, but um I’ve got my fingers crossed hopefully we’ll we’ll still have some more flowers to look at for a while. Last year it wasn’t until December 1st that we got our first frost and then one year it was mid October. So, you just never know. But, um, we’re going to start here in the, uh, mailbox bed and work our way around. Um, the one, uh, thing that has been a pleasant surprise, I talked about this last week, our little clatus has grown. Uh, we had a lot of clatus here that died off, and I had to pull them out earlier in the year, and this one has taken off. In fact, it’s really uh, kind of going crazy here in in the last couple of weeks, as if it was early spring already. Um, I’m uh trying to arrange it so that it’s not tied up with all these dying zenas, but uh uh we’re getting some nice jacamini uh purple flowers. Uh hopefully we’ll get quite a few more next spring. Time will tell. Um in the meantime, there’s just a few remaining flowers on our zenia. There’s really nothing new coming out. just a few that are out right now or hanging hanging on. Uh this probably will be the last week for the zenyas in this bed. Um and then I’ll just pull them all out. They’re they’re looking pretty sad already, but uh I I’m never one to give up on color if it’s if there’s something worth looking at. Now up here closer to the house, we have a little bit more going on. And uh we have you know the usual arrangement of colors. If you’ve looked back at some of our videos earlier in the year, um there was a lot of color, a lot of different varieties, reds and pinks and purples, whites, yellows, oranges, and so forth. Um just a little bit of that now. But, uh I don’t know if this is going to be the last week, but it’s going to be probably pretty close. So, enjoy it while it’s here. Uh we’ve got a beautiful day. I forgot to say this is a Friday afternoon. Uh it’s right around 62°, but in the sun it feels quite a bit warmer. It feels like it’s closer to 70, but um there’s definitely fall in the air and some of our trees have already lost their leaves. Others are still pretty green. So, um of course with November starting at midnight tonight, uh obviously we’re not uh looking at too much more in terms of summer color. Um, I did want to show this uh little petite knockout rose. Um, it’s kind of struggled over the summer, but uh now here in the fall it’s really had a resurgence. I deadheaded it. Haven’t really done much else with it. I have not really fertilized it or done any of the things that I should do. Um, just the deadheading and it did help. We’ve got nice a lot of nice flowers, but uh nothing nothing uh dramatic to look at there. Um, our uh blackeyed susans are completely done. You can kind of see those uh all the seed pods here, hundreds of them. Um, the uh yellow flowers that we had just as recently as a couple weeks ago are all gone. Um, do have a little bit of Russian sage still blooming here. And let’s see if I can get a good picture of it. Is these dainty little purple flowers? And I’ve said this before, it’s not an impact flower, but when you’re looking close and you see those, it’s kind of nice. Also have uh our biggest climbing rose here in the front. Uh it’s lost almost all of its leaves and I think it’s done as far as blooming. I I do see one or two buds up near the top, but um I I have a feeling we’ll get a frost before we get flowers out of that. Uh, but it has has been u uh a really uh dependable plant all through the the year. We’ve got other climbers here and I’ve cut them back, but they’ve um I think they’ve all pretty much finished up for the year. And other things up in here, clatus, all spring uh plants, irises and so forth. Those will come back next year. Um and then we’ve got uh hydrangeas over in here. This is a primarily a spring portion of the uh yard. Um, a lot of viburnum back in here. These will bloom next spring. One thing that is worth looking at back in what I call the uh cit citrus grove here at our front door. Um, we’ve got our orange tree, which actually looks pretty good on the surface where it gets some sunlight on the backside. Doesn’t look so good. Uh, it’s lost a lot of its leaves, but um um it’s definitely alive. It’s definitely uh putting out new growth. So, I don’t know what to expect of that. Same thing with our lemon tree. This thing has come and gone. Um I haven’t done the most to help it out. I I haven’t fertilized it as much um and uh as I should have and and I haven’t uh really protected it from the winter as well as I should, but uh it hasn’t neither one of those, the orange or the lemon tree, neither one have really put out any um flowers or anything else. So, they’re not necessarily worth the effort. The one thing that has uh been worth the effort, I bought these four bargain basement lemons at uh Home Depot a couple years ago and they don’t look like much, but one of them has in fact put out a couple of lemons and they’ve been growing very very slowly, but we’re starting to see them turn yellow and u they’re going to be ripe before you know it. Um hope hopefully that happens before the uh before the weather really turns sour. But at the rate they’re turning. I’m I’m going to say maybe by the end of November they’ll be ready to pick. So we’ll try to do that on one of our videos and kind of maybe celebrate the end of the season. Um as I said before, I think um these videos will continue until the the uh frosts really kick in and there’s nothing left to see. In fact, you could really argue there isn’t that much to see now, but I’m doing the video anyway for the 10 of you that are tuning in to see them. Um, and I do appreciate all the comments. Uh, I’ve gotten um comments on different flowers. Uh, I’m going to address those individually um because I I do appreciate that people are watching this and and uh enjoy it. Um, we’re going to talk about this little area here where we have some aelas. Not much to see. I mean, there are a couple of little red flowers. Um, a few buds on this one. For some reason, the others have have all bloomed. This one, you look closely and you can kind of see some buds still going on here. So, if if it doesn’t freeze, we may still get a little bit of color out of this one. This one up here, though, is uh this is about as as full a bloom as we’ve we’ve had. It’s a a lighter pink in color. Very very pretty flowers on this one. And uh it’s been blooming for a couple of weeks now. Uh not quite as much as it gets in the spring, but it’s still very nice to uh to see. Nice to have some color at this time of the year. And there really isn’t a whole lot else at this time. We’ve got our uh knockout roses here, big red ones. I um uh deadheaded them um probably a month ago, maybe 6 weeks ago. I think it was too little too late. They really haven’t done anything since then. But uh hopefully they will uh bloom again in the spring. Our butterfly bush back there is finished for the year. And just about everything in this bed is about done. Um we have salvia over here which is finished. Um irises. Um, we had uh see a dalia here that was finished up and what else? Um, uh, climbing rose, which doesn’t have any flowers on it, although it does have a nice bud right there. So, again, depending on the weather, we still may get a flower or two off of that one. We’ve had a lot of Asiatic and and oriental liies back in here. Um, these uh uh knockout roses are definitely not uh not doing much right now. They’re in fact they’re losing most of the leaves, but they they should come back next spring. Got four of them, four big ones here. And uh then dillies and more zenas, but everything is just about finished. So, it’s not a whole lot to see in this bed, but u still you never know what you’re going to run into as you walk through a garden. and there always some surprises to be had. So, um we’re going to get ready for next year and um hopefully we’ll have another good year. Try to get it all uh on video for you to see. And uh that’s about it. We’re going to do our backyard video here in just a second. And um continue to enjoy this nice afternoon. So, uh, wherever you are, I hope it’s sunny.
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