Halloween Christmas Cactus

 It's the end of October but the store aisles are already filled with Christmas decorations.  My Christmas Cactus is doing the same by blooming now.  Why wait? 

The outdoor task list is getting really short and it's okay with me. 

Jon's dahlia tubers have been cut off, dug up, divided and placed in their containers for the winter.  He has decided to eliminate one of the flower beds next year.  Next year there will be only one dahlia flower bed.  They are such lovely flowers, but also a lot of work  It's time to make it easier.

Now he is happily working on buring his brush piles which means he and Lady are out in the woods every day, tending to the burning pile and playing fetch.  

I am slowly working on getting all of the leaves blown into their proper places.  I have several beds I put them on and then the rest are blown to the border of the yard.  There's a lot of them and the battery for the leaf blower only lasts through half of what needs to be done every day.  Some days I actually get the battery recharged so that I can finish two sessions of leaf blowing. Unfortunately, there's never a time when I can say all of the leaves are off the lawn.  It just doesn't happen.

Speaking of working on some "fun stuff"...

All summer long our Running With Scissors band has been working on songs to record.  Today I will go to the studio to add the Hammond B3 parts to the songs.  It's the final recording before Bruce works on mixing the songs.  After playing together for many years, we will finally have a recording of the group:  Mark Heisel, trombone, Tim Gunn, percussion, Larry Guldberg, percussion, Bruce Bishop, electric guitar and bass guitar, Drew Browne, bass guitar and yours truly, piano and B3.  We haven't discussed a title for the album yet.

My favorite song out of the nine we recorded is our cover of an old song, Just One Look, written by Doris Troy and George Carroll.  It was also performed by Linda Ronstadt and many others, but I like Doris's version.  Summer 1963.  

Goodbye summer. Hello fall.

October 20, 2023 - High temperature - 70 degrees.

My begonias did not disappoint this year and these are the final photos of the flowers on the deck.  Everything has been trimmed and the begonia bulbs removed from their containers.  Even though we have had amazing fall weather, it's time to get ready for the first snowflakes.

The final tomatoes and peppers went into my 40 pints of salsa.  We still have a "eating" tomatoes, slowly ripening on a shelf in the basement.

There were grapes this year.  Since most of our fruit trees are gone, the bear and the raccoons did not show up.   They were really sweet and good enough for both grape jelly and grape juice.  

Twenty-eight jars of jelly and 6 quarts of juice.

We had a family vote for which of the three trees shown below would be the Burkhart Christmas tree this year.   Tree #2, was the winner.  My zoom photos are poor quality.  It may finally be time to give up my iPhone 7.

Jon is in his element now.  He had sixteen brush piles to burn and Friday, Oct. 20th was the first day open burning was allowed.  He is "on it"!  Over the past two days he's burned eight!  Wow!   It's lots and lots of work.

It's so warm this year that it was t-shirt weather.

My deck is now empty.

After lengthy discussions we decided to remove about half of the soil from this planter and then cover what's left for the winter.

We have lawn chairs in strategic spots both in the garden and out on the lawn.  It's a necessity for us old folks when we're working outside.  We need a place to sit down and rest.  In our younger years we thought nothing of going out and working for 6 hours straight.  Not now.

I have moved my houseplants from the front porch to the bay window.  My Christmas Cactus decided it was time to bloom and is spectacular!  The "white" in the middle of my photo is part of one of my ghosts.  

For my friend Judy Butler, the turtle is still hanging on.  He'll be in a warmer spot this winter.

My ghosts are pretty scary,  They have lights that are on a timer so they turn on at dark.

We caught Lady playing with one of the Sungold tomatoes and couldn't figure out where she got it.  (Anything that looks like a ball to her, is fair game).  We took the first one away from her and then she showed up with another one.  It turns out that five of them had fallen on the floor and were hidden by a pillow.  They were all in various stages of drying.

I took some photos of the last of the dahlias because Jon has cut them down and is getting ready to dig up the tubers this week.  This is a beautiful April Dawn.

    

This land is your land.

This song and video is worth watching just for the beautiful photos.