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.