The town pickup for fall yard waste is a week from Monday, and I’ve got a lot of clipping to do. I spent all day Sunday cutting back the brown Shasta daisy stems, yellowing lemon balm, broken Tithonia that fell over in recent rain, and about half of the blackened echinacea stems. I couldn’t bear to cut the echinacea all back — just this morning, goldfinches swayed on their crispy cones — so I left some at the back of the bed. But they’re really terribly ugly, and we only have so much room for composting; I had to cut some of them for the town to take away. My yard waste from today lines about 20 feet of our curb. Unless I get a chipper, I don’t have space to compost all the vegetation from the annuals and perennials in my garden.
I dug up a bunch of stuff I decided I don’t like anymore, like the wormwood that gets shaggy by the end of summer and that’s just not that interesting to me, and the lambs ears that grew so aggressively, they killed off some of my favorite plants. I dug out some lemon balm, too, to thin it. And I pulled out the tomatoes and their supports.
Mostly it just felt good to be out in the garden again. It hasn’t required much of me this summer, which is good, because I was off paddling and doing other fun things, and I didn’t have much to give. I enjoyed being among my plants again. Roses scented the air while I weeded their bed, and when I sheared the lavender and the lemon balm, the mint and the rosemary, I got to smell all their herby fragrances. Butterflies still float and flutter. At any given time, there would be three or four monarchs on the Zinnias and Tithonia. We still have one more chrysalis (that I know of) that we’re waiting for to release its butterfly.
After I cleaned up a bit, I took my camera out for some October garden shots.
Butterfly Mind 
Lovely photos!
LikeLike