Well it's taken a few weeks but winter has finally made it's self known here in the land down under or at least here in Tasmania. We had two of the coldest mornings so far this winter. The past two days both mornings were below freezing and both days never even reached their expected highs, missing them each day by 4 degrees, which if you translate those numbers from Celisius to Farenheit it means we missed the mark by 7 degrees.
There was frost on the lawn and in the garden. We even had a bit of ice on the windshield of the car to go along with a nice coating of frost that covered the entire top of the car. The frost was so thick on the car it looked more like snow as it was about 1/4 in thick. It was really pretty cold. I know it's nothing as cold as it gets in say Minnesota but then again now where gets as cold as Minnesota, unless maybe Winnipeg Canada, or Siberia, or let me think... Oops sorry, I started to wander. Old age will do that along with a heavy dose of pian medication.
Where was I? Ah yes, it's winter here. Anyway, so since we figured winter has finally settled in we decided it was time to winterise the garden. We got stuck into raking up the last of the dead leaves, trimming a few trees, and pruning back the roses etc., etc. To be honest, James did most of the winterising. My contribution, other than giving moral support, was planting some new pansy's we bought at the nursery. Hey, planting pansy's is hard work. I had to plant like 50 new plants. OK maybe it was only 10 but by the time I had cleared out all of the pots, recyclde the old soil, refilled them with new soil and actually planted the flowers I'm telling you I almost broke a sweat. On top of all that did I fail to mention having to decide which pansy's were going in which pots and in which colour combination. I had to take at least 4 hot tea breaks. Let's not forget I also found time to put together a new pot of herbs to put in the kitchen. Let me tell you there was some manual labour going on my friend, mostly on James' part but none the less it happened.
After it was all done it looked really nice. You know even when all of the leaves are off the trees (except for the conifers of course) and the majority of your flowers have gone to sleep, there is still something to be said about a nice clean, tidied up, pruned back garden topped of with a bit of extra new mulch to protect the bulbs and to minimise the weeds, which although not as prolific as in summer still seem to be the only thing that grows in the garden on going. James worked really hard and I just kind of put bows on everything to make it all look pretty. I'm just sayin'.
