This Fall Garden Kalendar is composed of edited excerpts from garden journal entries composed in October-December of 2018. The quoted passages represent about 25% of the total journal. The chosen entries primarily focus on the Coe garden, with occasional commentary on my vegetable garden (near Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center), my gardens at home (including large hosta beds that have replaced my front yard’s lawn), and my garden and landscaping projects at Buffalo United Methodist Church. The italicized quotations sprinkled through the Kalendar are from Eleanor Perényi’s Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (Vintage Books, 1981), a collection of essays that provided me many hours of pleasurable reading throughout the year. Because of the excessive length of this fall Kalendar, the complete text can be read as a pdf document by clicking on this link to Fall Garden Kalendar 2019. ~Bob
• A border is among other things a calendar of the seasons, and I don’t look for columbines in August or chrysanthemums in July. ~Eleanor Perényi
4 October 2018 (Thursday). It feels appropriate that I begin the month of October with a new garden journal, one with front and back covers a Monet painting featuring the Japanese bridge in his garden at Giverny. Most of my garden journal observations are recorded in cast-off notebooks. This journal feels too elegant for mundane recordings on my soil affairs. But so be it.
This morning I was at Coe. After miscellaneous non-garden tasks, I unloaded the mulch in the pickup and dedicated my energies to serious weeding at the east end of the “D” bed and spreading “fresh” mulch that had been covering a lawn section. In the afternoon I pulled back a large swath of weed control fabric over a lawn section and collected earthworms, transporting them to one of the compost bins. Also killed 30+ grubs. Dug up a lot of determined violets, unfazed after spending three months covered by the weed-control fabric and mulch. I then fertilized the lawn section with Milorganite, spread the sunshine grass seed mix, and covered the exposed seed with a roll of compressed straw matting. I didn’t water because the soil is already wet, and it’s supposed to rain tonight. Forecast is for rain to continue off and on for the next week. (Full text available in the Fall Garden Kalendar 2019 pdf.)