The Great Migration

The weather continues delightfully unseasonably warm, but I finally decided it is time to bring in the lemon trees and my few other tender plants.  We've had light frosts on the car so far, but not a hard killing frost, and they have been doing fine but as always, I am pushing my luck. Time to make space and bring them all in.

Once upon a time, I had lots of tender perennials, elephant ears and cannas and bananas and a variety of palm trees. Space was always an issue. Now I'm down to two palms and three lemon trees, a sad little christmas cactus, and some parsley.

Remember the lemon trees ? The almost-dead but not quite lemon trees?  They survived a fairly neglectful summer outside, leafed out nicely, and just came in. The two Meyer lemons seem set to bloom. They will have lights for the winter, still set up from last year. All I have to do is plug them in and set the timer.

My winter plant managerie.

Cousin It.

I also have a couple of palm trees. One used to be very full, and became known as the "Cousin It" plant. Now, it is a mere shadow of its former shaggy glory, but is filling in with sprouts out of its base.

Junior

It has a smaller and younger cousin, that has truly been neglected. It dried up once, and from then on has not been able to drink properly, because water just ran down the gap at the sides of the pot and right out the bottom.

So in the spirit of tough love, I wrestled it out of the pot and added a bunch of new soil, packed it in, and soaked it.  It's not clear Junior will survive, but it was definitely worth a try. I love the shape of this pot, but it's not very practical - the top is more narrow than the middle and so I had a hard time removing the plant plus root ball. Silly me, I put it back in the same pot.

















Meantime, on the foliage front, the hickories are all shrivelled and brown, but the red oak has just come into its own.  Autumn afternoons with the sun right behind it is the view from my living room window.

The oak leaf hydrangea also just keeps getting better.  I don't get tired of looking at it.



Overall, the leaves are about half or less down on the ground. I think this upcoming Thanksgiving weekend is too soon to start the leaf cleanup, if I only want to do it once.