Autumn is Here!

This evening we decided to sit out on the patio to enjoy the cool weather and to try out our new fire bowl. I've been wanting one of these for a while, and Bill bought this one for us last week. It seemed like a good way to burn up all of the dead fall in the yard and then be able to put the ashes into the gardens.

Well, look at that...a quilt art idea in the fire! Look at how the burning leaves have a bright glow around the edges. Aren't they pretty? I can do that with Lumiere paint! Four or five times I had Bill throw a sprig of leaves onto the fire to catch this photograph, ha ha.

Here are the aforementioned gardens. They are raised because we have that beautiful red Georgia clay... which is a bear to garden in. It's as hard as a brick in mid-summer if there's no rain. We just planted radishes and salad greens, and having grown this pepper plant for the last five months, we may actually get a pepper out of it. How, you ask? Fishing line around the garden to keep the deer from eating it! It actually does have a pepper that's about 1" long--our first of the year.

This is our herb garden, with two kinds of cilantro, two mint plants, some defunct basil seeds, and some surprise bush cucumber plants. The cucumber seeds were from 2007 and we didn't expect them to come up, but they did!

This third garden is eagerly awaiting its planting of garlic seed (cloves). We've turned under good topsoil, leaves, and about four months worth of kitchen scraps to get this baby ready. Last year's crop didn't do well because it was only topsoil over red clay (we had just moved in).

I love the South and fall gardens that last throughout the winter!