It has been over a month since I have posted. I have been gone several weekends, and the early dark once the time changed earlier this month has made it difficult for me to get out and accomplish much outside. We got a surprise snowfall on the evening of Monday, November 11 and awoke to this light snow on the ground on Tuesday, though it quickly melted off.
Snow on the trees and the side yard on Tuesday morning.
Today was an unusually warm day getting up into the mid-70s early on, though it had cooled off by the evening. It was very windy with some storms and rain quickly rolling through and some bad tornadoes in the Peoria area. The trees have now lost all of their leaves that will fall. Some of the oaks will retain most of their brown leaves for the winter.
More of the bare trees with leaves on the ground. I did get a bit of the yard mowed late today. I am trying to complete hte last mowing of the year but it has been delayed by several weeks by the dark evenings and absent weekends.
The peppers and tomatoes were zapped long ago by frost and freezing weather. The temperature has gotten down into the teens a few times at night. I did pick some of the birdhouse gourds that I had left in the garden and hope that they weren't harmed by the brief freezing weather.
The grapes are bare now. The vines are pulled down from the wires in places due to animals climbing on them to get at the ripe grapes. I am going to have to come up with an effective way to keep them.out. I think it was possums or raccoons that did the damage.
Some apples still cling to the enterprise apple trees. I picked several of these today. There are a lot of apples on the ground and several of the apples in the trees showed damage -- from birds, I think.
I need to finish getting my bees completely ready for winter. With the cold weather they are probably in cluster now. I need to wrap the hives and add a sugar block of some kind for emergency food, and add some bit of ventilation to the hives, then let them be until Spring.
