End of the season blues

Well like an idiot, I did not run outside and turn off all the water taps the minute I finished my last blog. I got distracted again by words. I know if I go into the garden of course I’m going to be distracted by plants and never come back indoors. But yesterday during a killer game of Scrabble with grandsons, Nick and Dashy, the latter shouted “Wow look at all the ice in the fountain.”Yikes he was so right and I hadn’t even noticed it. He tore outside impervious to temperature and started hacking away, lifting out big sheets of ice with a transplanting trowel. Very useful for breaking up ice. Then he hauled the fountain’s pump out from the mess and brought it indoors.Of course, we had to test to make sure it hadn’t been ruined by being frozen. So I filled the sink with water, plugged in the fountain and, yes, it works. It’s a pump isn’t it? So it pumped water all over the kitchen. We were laughing so hard I came in second on the Scrabble (Nick skunked us both).I seem to be giong at this business of closing down the garden in the worst possible way—a bit at a time. The temps are going up again supposedly though I seldom trust weather reports anymore. But this is definitely—a do what I write, not what I do—kind of a situation. Closing down the garden should be done in one fell swoop.What’s left: those hoses. Removing all the yucky leaves from around the hostas. And mulching. I need to put down mulch everywhere and it has to be this week. I’ve got a fair load of compost, bags of manure and city compost which i’ll mix up. Down it goes around the plants that need it and surely I can’t find more jobs left undone.