First Snow of this winter

It was beautiful... But thankfully just a short lived snow. Sunday morning last week, I think just a week after the beautiful warm Halloween evening on Friday, we had our first snow.

The view was quite lovely from the bathroom window as we dragged ourselves out of bed, and so, since it really wasn't all that cold outside, I put on some shoes and a sweater and went outside to grab a few photos.

I think I have taken more photos of this yard in the last year than anything else. Far more than can be reasonably added to this blog. This is the bane of digital photography - it is so easy to just keep snapping shots, and so difficult to cull through them. The space they take up on hard drives is huge. But I suppose it isn't as huge as the boxes of old photos that I have from my grandparents and parents.

The pond is basically ready to be put away for the winter. But we haven't had time to try to rescue any of the fish. We did manage to acquire a new filter and set up the aquarium in the basement. I hope the ice stays away until next weekend so we can try to capture at least one or two of the big guys in here to save them for next spring's larger version. I've decided to let some of the plants around the pond go, so we can expand and deepen it. Lee and LIn's pond is really only a little bigger than ours, but they are able to keep it open all winter and find much to watch even in the coldest weeks. Their fish reproduce and multiply, and they don't have to deal with them in the house over the winter.

This shot is of one of the sedum clumps at the sides of the vegetable garden. Some small creature has been digging down and around the roots of the plant and has managed to weaken the stems so that they aren't able to stand on their own. The main reason I love sedums is the structure of the plant in the fall, so this is something of a theft of all my hard work over this season. I think I'll have to dig it up and replant it this fall, hoping that it is able to establish itself well enough to re-grow in the spring. I'll leave some as they are just in case.

This is a photo of the east side of the house, after one growing season. Last spring I dug and killed pretty much everything here, hoping to re structure things and create some more mature beauty. I've had to use some Round-Up here and there, and I like it so far, but it has not managed to live up to my vision yet. Maybe next year.