* There have been enough cold nights to toughen up late garden stalwarts like parsley, kale, and chard, but even tough stuff has trouble when it goes below the mid-twenties. In some years, these things can hold on until Christmas, but it doesn’t hurt to cover your bets by covering some plants ( there’s still quite a bit of warmth in the ground, see September 30th for a bit more on how this works). On the other hand, you can also just pick everything that’s left, give away whatever you can’t use and call it a day until March.

* The onset of cold weather is also a reminder there’s no time to lose in the window-washing department. This loathsome chore doesn’t sound very gardenly, but you’d be surprised how much light you lose when the windows are less than clean. Any houseplants that count on those windows will be very grateful you bothered and of course there will also be a little more light for you.

* If you were on top of it and put your pots of amaryllis into dry, dark storage sometime back in late August or early September, they can be pulled out now and revived. If you were not so on top of it, file this away until it has been 2 to 3 months since you DID do the dry dark deal, the goal of which is to make them think it’s winter in South America.
Amaryllis don’t like root disturbance, so it’s better not to divide them, but they can’t bloom well if they’re choked, either. Take a deep breath, make a decision, then split apart any bulb clusters so fat they’re bursting out of the pot. For all the others, just discard the top inch or so of old soil, loosen what’s underneath with a fork, then put on an inch of new soilless mix like pro-mix.
Water well - just water, don’t add any fertilizer - and put in a warm, bright spot. Then wait, resisting the impulse to water again, either until you see signs of growth or a month has passed, whichever comes first. The accepted rule is that any bulb that made 5 leaves or more last season will be strong enough to flower this time around, but as far as I can tell from my ever-growing 15 year old herd of amaryllis, this rule is complete hooey. Pixies tell amaryllis when and whether to flower, so there’s no point in getting too het up about it.

* Bittersweet berries are more likely to stay attached if the vines are harvested before the fruit jackets burst. An awful lot of orange red is already in evidence, so it’s too late to expect miracles, but the sooner you cut the Thanksgiving daécor, the better it will last. Making sure the discards can’t sprout may feel like pissing on a forest fire, but anything that can be done to stop this stuff is worth doing. If burning is out, put the fruit-laden vines in a bucket of water ( in the shed or garage or wherever) and leave them until they rot

Driving around between Millbrook and Poughkeepsie, crossing the bridge to get apples in New Paltz, gazing to the right and left, there’s no mistaking the passing of fall – fewer and fewer leaves on the trees, ever duller colors on the leaves that remain. Vegetable gardens have been tidied for winter, there are miles of black plastic deer fence in place.
Yet it keeps bouncing back to t-shirt weather, prompting vague guilts that one should be at work outdoors, even though there’s really nothing left to do – assuming all the bulbs are finally in – except rake leaves, mow grass and rake more leaves.
This should be the start of time off, the northern gardeners’ reward. It should be a time of seed catalog by the fire, cup of hot cider near to hand, possibly a little Thanksgiving menu planning: heavy on the home grown greens and squash, maybe a spiced cream of tomato soup from the puree in the freezer.
Instead, we had BLT’s for lunch just 4 days ago, with the almost-last of the saved fresh fruit and went out in search of mushrooms. There should be blewits and shaggy manes, but there aren’t, and the last of the big agaricus, but all that rain must have come too late – all we saw were enough autumn galerina to poison most of the county and an impressive fruiting of stinkhorns, erecting though deep piles of leaves.

* Before you put leftover seeds away, go through and discard everything more than 3 years old …unless it’s some kind of rare heirloom bean or what-all that you’re SURE you will plant next year, before the seed expires completely. Next, applying the same criterion in the rarity department, throw out all the asters, parsley, onions and delphiniums, which seldom last more than one season. Not every old seed is a dud, but in the North, the window for second tries is small, so there’s no point in risking failure unless you really have to.

* While you’re seed-sorting, supplement your notes ( if any) about how all this stuff did. Start next year’s list – catalogs are already coming in. And if you didn’t map this year’s vegetable garden; waste no time. You won’t get far with rotation planting if you forget what went where..

* If you potted up some spring bulbs to force for winter bloom, don’t forget to buy some winter rye seed now, while it’s still available. About a week after you bring the bulbs out of storage, scratch the grass seed into the soil surface. There should be a pretty green lawn around the stems by the time they bloom.

The blueberries have disobligingly dropped all their leaves and are as bare as January, but the oakleaf hydrangea is gorgeous. At the top , a deep sort of mahogany plum that looks polished, beneath that a dark rich green with just a bit of plum wash. Same deal on the cranberry viburnums, except that their red is more toward the orange side. Best yellow is probably the peonies – or what’s left of them. Bill cut most of the foliage down some time ago, eager to get it onto the burn pile before it withered and shattered.
That would be the best yellow at our house. Out in the world the Norway maples are golden and glorious, almost – although not quite - enough to excuse their piggish ways. You really notice it in a year like this, when the leaf season is less than splendid, coming rapidly to a close without ever really getting started. Blasting heat and drought drove a lot of leaves into early senescence, then high winds and driving rains pummeled them down.
Depressingly, this highlights more than the maples: everything upright appears to sporting chartreuse festoons of bittersweet, whole hillsides are pink with euonymus. It’s one thing to know these invaders are taking over the countryside, quite another to have it demonstrated so forcefully. ( Like the color in autumn leaves, this stuff has been here all summer long, just waiting for the retreat of greenness to be a real sock in the face).
Meanwhile, plants that respond more to frost than to daylength are merrily green as ever. Just the other day I saw flowerbuds – nearly open flowerbuds! - on hollyhocks, rue, and tansy. The roses were going great guns until a week ago. And the Tristar strawberries I brought down from Maine , still in their big pots beside the back door, are drooping with almost-ripe fruit.

* It’s almost too much to bear when you’re right in the midst of cleaning up and looking forward – eagerly! - to not thinking about the whole thing, but now is the time to prepare a few beds for early spring planting. The soil is usually too wet to work in March and April, optimal planting time for peas and sweet peas, so it really helps if all you have to do is set stakes and plant seeds. Choose spots you can reach from paths or lawn. Clean out all the weeds and put on a good thick layer of compost.

* The “get ready now” advice started with peas because they take up the most space ( and happen to be favorites of mine) but it also applies to onions, Bibb lettuce and fava beans.

* If you have spread straw mulch over newly planted garlic, marginally hardy flower bulbs, or recently divided perennials, it’s likely the rains have rewarded you with a lawnlike crop of young oats, and that they appear to be worrysomely hardy. Worry not. Even though frost doesn’t bother them, winter cold will kill them down.

For a while there, it was beginning to look like we could have fresh raspberry sauce on the Thanksgiving turkey. But a couple of light frosts later, it’s mostly clear that I should have remembered to water the chrysanthemums, back when we were having the drought, a thousand years ago. The plants are bushy and covered with flowers ( I DID remember to prune them in late June) it’s just that the flowers are smallish, and some of them have what might be called idiosyncratic shapes.

On the other hand BEETS!?? Omigosh. Didn’t do anything special for them, either, but they’ve outdone themselves this year. A long fall that’s moist and cool-but-not-cold is any beet’s idea of a good time, and these being Lutz Winter Keepers they simply don’t know when to stop. Voles often take up residence underneath them and gnaw away unseen, but Vinnie the cat has been on the job and most of the crop is sound. Just pulled up one specimen the size of a volleyball – no joke; it weighted almost 5 pounds – and the great part is it will be sweet and tender, in spite of its size. Forage beets, the ones called (I love this) mangelwurtzels, can weigh a great deal more; but they were bred for feeding to livestock and that’s just what they taste like.

Lutz beets are not usually a retail-rack item, but they’re easy to mail-order. One good source is Rohrer seed, which has a nice selection of table beets and also sells seed for mangels, just in case you don’t believe me and want to give ‘em a try. (www.rohreerseeds.com)