Flower Garden Clean-up

The first few days of November were warm and balmy in our little corner.  After a week of chilly temperatures, the warmer weather was a welcomed change.  Wanting to take advantage of the last of the warm days, I spent one of the gloriously warm days outside putting my sleepy flower gardens to bed, clipping the dead stalks of the perennials and trimming the overgrown forsythia bush.  The dead leaves were raked into piles, and the Littles helped me dump them in the vegetable garden where they will be tilled under later.  I filled the two bird feeders that will remain up during the winter for the chickadees and nuthatches and planted daffodil bulbs. My daffodils have become a bit sparse over the past few years, and after planting almost 100 bulbs, I'm hoping for thicker waves of sunshine in the spring.

The air was filled with tiny blue and white fuzzy flies...the kids call them "smurf bugs", but I'm not exactly sure what their true name is.  We see them every year in late autumn, usually on very warm days, but the kids are convinced that they mean snow is coming. It's kind of ironic; the same day we saw them, we heard snow flurries predicted in the weather report that evening. (We didn't, however, see any of , , in our area.) The little flies are actually quite cute, and, as you can see, very tiny.  To us they are a reminder that, although we have enjoyed milder temperatures the past few days, Old Man Winter can't be held off much longer; he is on his way.

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