Fall seems to have jumped the gun a bit this year out here, and we’re already seeing temperatures in the 40’s at night, and it isn’t even October! I welcome the cool nights as I can open the windows and cool the house down at night. We were still getting some daytime highs in the 90’s last week, so my plants were having a hard time adjusting!
I don’t have many pictures of the garden this year, we had another bad year of grasshoppers and things got pretty chewed to pieces. What the grasshoppers didn’t get, like my sunflowers, the borers killed before they bloomed.
Even my front planters struggled, as the grasshoppers chewed the petunias and the coleus to shreds. I had a few weeks where it looked “decent”:
This next picture is a “garden in a bag” I bought at Tractor Supply, something called “Bird and Butterfly Mix”, that has the seeds mixed with a little fertilizer and mulch. I literally threw the seed on the ground and scratched a little dirt over them and this was the result:
Isn’t it great? I had bees and small butterflies around it for weeks, and all kinds of little pollinators.
Which reminds me of something else- we had NO monarch butterflies come through here during migration, normally I’ll have dozens of them over several days- like last year:
We did have some nice rain this summer, so there’s lots of flowers blooming on the prairie, so maybe they’re out there. So I’m a bit worried, what has everyone else seen this year?
While the garden hasn’t been performing and is now slowly fading, I’ve gotten into taking lots of cloud and sky pictures, so I’ll share a couple and then let everyone else take the floor!
