Haven't been here for awhile....

The blog, I mean.  I've been home a fair amount, but not writing in the blog.  And not really around the yard a whole lot.  We've gone from summer to late fall so quickly, I don't know what happened.  Oh Yeah, WLA happened.  And a lot of very rainy, gray days.  The last month has been almost entirely gray and wet and cold and dismal outside, which is not terrible since I've been confined to the inside for a variety of reasons.  But today was glorious!

The sun came out, and lasted for the entire day, almost completely uninterrupted.  I had to go to Rotary, and also to an event at FVTC in the late afternoon, but the morning and the mid-afternoon were wonderful.  Managed to rake the worst areas of leaf-fall on the lawn after Rotary. 

And also to take a few photos of the last remaining flowers.  They could be considered pitiful, but I think of them as eternal optimists.  Still blooming when all hope is done.  My goal is always to have blooms from early April until late October.  So I leave things that others might cut back, just to enjoy the last flowers.  Hardly any of these are native Wisconsin plants.  Those are smarter, and they have all set seed and died back by now.  I leave most of them standing, because the birds love the seeds.  The Juncos have arrived, and the yard is full of them and of Chickadees and Cardinals and all kinds of finches.  Most of what you see here are introductions, but some of them are hardy, either as perennials, or as ambitious re-seeding annuals. 

 

Not sure that I even recorded in the blog the Heron that took up residence in the neighborhood this fall.  He (she?) terrorized the fish in our pond and our neighbor's for a couple of weeks.  Hard to believe that a heron could even notice the tiny ponds we have, but we both lost fish (or parts of them.)