The Last Soybean Feeding

I forgot to mention it before--the final feeding of soybean meal on the lawn went on September 28th. Since it didn't rain until early October, I'm entirely comfortable calling this the October feeding of the lawn.

As always, I used 15 pounds per thousand square feet, or approximately 7 pounds of protein. That's right around 1 pound of nitrogen equivalent per thousand square feet, or more than sufficient to carry the lawn through the end of the season.

This doesn't quite finalize the lawn feeding.  Winterization with a good synthetic (I chose Vigoro 29-0-5 again this year as it's cheap and effective) will happen when top growth stops.  Normally, that's around Thanksgiving, give or take a few weeks.

Once I winterize, I'll post the charts of all additions to the lawn and garden for the year.

Mid-October Lawn Photos

Plus the gardens, of course.  First frost is most likely tonight as the temperature is 39° and dropping at just before 7 PM.  Today was the last chance to take garden photos for the year, even though a few plants will survive this evening and continue to blossom into November.

First, the lawn photo.  This one isn't quite the typical shot as the sun was lower than usual.  To avoid catching my own shadow in the image, I turned a bit further south than I usually do.  As always, click to embiggen and see how badly the lawn needs mowing (very badly).



Here are the Color Spectacle dahlia, plus red salvia and a few rather sad-looking late zinnia.  The dahlia will be making an encore appearance next year.



A more southern face of the garden, featuring yellow Sun Lady dahlia, a few remaining marigolds, and more Color Spectacle.



The red salvia certainly do hang on well.  So, it seems, do yellow Janie marigolds, which are also planned to appear again next year.  Very few marigolds output flowers like this in October.

Early October Photos

Last night wasn't quite first frost, although some of the zinnia in the lower parts of the back beds had their flowers blasted.  Still, it looks like identical weather tonight and Monday, and then we warm up again.

As always, click on a photo to embiggen it.

This is the standard lawn shot, now with extra dogs (which were out at the time the photo was taken). Riley is clearly concerned that the more-distant Casey might be having fun he's being left out of.



The back gardens are doing well, although the cleome seems to be reacting to the colder weather as well.  That can be removed when I have time and ground up for the compost bin.  The dead grass at the garden edge is where I re-imposed the edging that walked inward over the course of the season, and I generally spray it twice a year in July and September.



The front gardens are doing fairly well, too, although you can see the places where some plants have been removed for the season as they gave up.



More extensive use of dahlia is new for me this year.  This is a Color Spectacle dahlia, quite cheap at Home Depot in very late spring.  My apologies for the poor photo.  The flowers are huge, so I have to back off enough for you to see the entire thing, but doing so required me to move into a bad spot.

Blossoms are more rare than other dahlia, with both of these plants hosting around 12 blooms at a time.



This is another dahlia, the much more standard Sun Lady.  Flowers are around 4" across, and erupt copiously on a 40" plant.  This particular dahlia has around 25 blooms on it currently--as do the other four Sun Lady in the garden.  That's after cutting at least twenty for vases and for gifts this week.



Yet another dahlia, the Blue Boy.  It's a semi-cactus in a fairly pure purple (the color is somewhat darker than pictured here).  Flowers are close to 6" across on 24-30" plants, and the plant blooms copiously (as you can see by the other blooms in the shot).