* After frost blackens the dahlia tops, wait for a dry day – hah! HOPE for a dry day – within the next week or so, before you dig up the tubers. Turn the clumps upside down to dry in the sun, then remove any damaged tubers and lightly brush off loose dirt. Pack in plastic-lined cardboard boxes, surrounded by packing peanuts. If you give each variety its own container, any old marking label will do, assuming you use indelible ink.

* Fallen leaves make wonderful mulch, but not until they have been ground up, so you might as well mow the lawn while they’re lying there, then rake the resultant grass and leaf mixture. The nitrogen in the grass will help break down the otherwise rot-resistant leaves, so by spring they will be nice fluffy leaf mold instead of plant-smothering dead-leaf-packets.

* Note: each year as the hideous racket gets going, I hope someone will stage a John-Henry style contest between a hand-held leaf blower and a rake. Not some giant industrial model – that I’ll concede – but the small ones that REALLY make you want to kill. If anyone knows of such a contest, please send me an e-mail so I can spread the word.

At this point I’ve almost given up hoping, but with any luck there’ll be frost pretty soon, to put the garden out of its misery. In the old days – a decade ago, or, if you’re being strictly accurate, last month – frost was to dread, on account of the tender food items that were still coming in. But absence of frost, while necessary, is not sufficient in these matters. All good things from raspberries to zucchini need warmth and sunshine to develop flavor… and while ample moisture is important,

Well, let’s just say this weather has only been right for mushrooms and even the mushrooms are slow. It may be that they’re sogged out, or they may just be a month late, along with almost everything else.

I say “almost” because the nuts are more or less on time. The back yard is littered with black walnuts and our neighbors’ Chinese chestnut tree is raining abundance all over the street. The chestnuts are small but quite tasty, and this year they seem to be less buggy than usual.

But hassle factor aside, we still gather them with mixed emotions because they remind us of what has been lost — and of how quickly it vanished. Once the chestnut blight arrived, at the end of the 19th century, it took less than 50 years to effectively wipe out the mightiest hardwood of the Eastern forest. American chestnuts are still abundant, because the roots survive chestnut blight and keep sending up new shoots. But the shoots are frustration incarnate: they grow quickly into beautiful small trees and then, just as they start to gain stature and bear – death. Over and over and over.

If we had room to plant large trees, we’d link up with one of the organizations devoted to bringing our chestnuts back. The American Chestnut Foundation (www.acf.org) is the largest and best publicized, but if you are not a fan of Peabody coal, there is perhaps even more to like about the much smaller American Chestnut Cooperator’s Foundation (http://www.accf-online.org), which originates at Virginia tech.

* If you have had problems with carrot whitefly – those disgusting little worms that make tunnels – it’s best to pull carrots as soon as they’re ready, even though the standard advice is to leave them and simply harvest as needed. When the whiteflies keep reproducing, as they well might in weather like this, carrots that are gorgeous now can be bug-riddled by Thanksgiving.

* The heavy rains have loosened the soil, so this is a good time to dig the roots of tenacious weeds like dandelion and poke. It’s also a good time to move perennials, should that happen to be on your list.

* Feel free to be tempted by bargain bulbs, which should be appearing any day now, but beware of soft spots. A little mold won’t hurt anything, but lots of it is a bad sign. Avoid fertilizing with bone meal if you have skunks in the neighborhood; it often attracts them to dig up the bulbs. The jury is still out on the mad cow angle, but if I were sprinkling bone meal around, I’d be wearing a good mask.

Last week’s report ( for those who missed it on the podcast) follows. Normally I’d just apologize for failing to post it and move on, but this time it’s still relevant, because

the weather has done a 180. Last week it was catastrophic drought. This week – catastrophic rain. It’s good news for the trees, which will have a chance to rehydrate before winter’s desiccating winds, but it’s not so cheery for what it suggests about big ticket climate change. This was New York’s second-warmest summer on record, and in our neighborhood the water has hit the hundred year flood mark.

We have yet to have a frost, so whenever it comes it will be by far the latest on OUR record, and when the cold finally does show up, it may well be just as dramatic as everything else.

Meanwhile, the new climate zone map prepared by the USDA has yet to be officially released , a year – or by now I guess it’s two or three years - after they drew it up. Data collected in the 90’s made it clear that average winter lows in most of the US are higher than they used to be, but for some mysterious reason, “review” is taking a lot longer than usual.

When the map finally comes out – possibly in the next administration - much of the Hudson Valley will be in zone 6, and folks in coastal Connecticut might be tempted to start thinking “palm trees, how about some palm trees…”. But in the end, it doesn’t matter. Microclimates laugh at averages, and it will always be a full zone colder in our low-lying vegetable patch than in the south facing stone-walled herb bed right beside the house.

For those who don’t have a zone map handy, the 1990 version is widely available on the net, among other places at the national arboretum site: http://www.usna.usda.gov. The link is at the bottom of the page.

The Garden report for October 6: What’s to say? It’s dry. It’s HOT and dry. The lawn had started to green back up, but now it’s losing ground again … revealing everything we need to know about the soil beneath. Where there’s good dirt – deep – there is green grass. Where the soil is poor – and where we suspect ancient paving about 18 inches down – a less-than-tasteful tan reigns. Major quantities of compost will help, but a good soaking rain would help more.

Out in the larger landscape, same story, even year-round swamps are failing. Worst mushroom year we’ve ever seen. It is not October, big time, even though the apples are coming in and leaves are turning – brown. Not all of them, of course, pockets of encouraging color grow larger every day, but stressed trees tend to defoliate quickly, so this is unlikely to be a boffo year for leaf-peeping.

It’s an ill wind and all like that, however; this year’s been great for long-season hot weather lovers like lima beans, which by and large would rather be growing in Dixie. This is the first time we’ve ever had something that could be called a crop, instead of an experiment.