The Painted Ponies Go Up and Down

Like it or not summer is over and fall is in the air.  The smell of burning leaves and garden waste is constant.  There are few summer flowers left and the reds and golds of autumn flowers fill the flower beds along the street.  Temps are warm in the mid afternoon - even mid-30s some days but drop to as low as 8 to 12 at night.

The root vegetables are all dug and bags of potatoes and onions are stacked in markets and roadsides, selling for as low as $0.35 per kg.  It was a good year for veggies.  All that is left in our garden is cabbage.  The rest has been cleared off.

We hired a couple to dig the garden.  Last fall Tanya bought two truckloads of well rotted manure (actually black topsoil) and the couple were spreading it over the garden using our wheelbarrow and then mixing it as they turned the soil over.  Hard work. But they have no work.  Victims of the failure of the FSU. 

The man used to drive a tractor at a collective farm and remembered Tanya from previous times. The woman is "not quite right".  She has a very bad arm, broken and unattended years ago and healed at an offset angle to where it should be. They obviously have nothing.  Tanya dug through her stash of clothes and shoes and filled a bag for the woman, which was appreciated. 

Tanya gave them a little money at the end of each day as they likely needed it for food.  Four days ago she paid them up to date and we haven't seen them since.  They'll be back and finish the job, we are not worried.  Our back fence neighbour chided Tanya for paying them before the work was finished but she said she couldn't not pay them.

We had a four-inch rain last night  - the drops were four inches apart.  Tanya spent today watering her flowers.  She has been clearing out space to plant the spring bulbs.  Every day she says to me "I have a new plan".  Her flowers move around a lot as she experiments with locations and combinations. 

The bulbs for spring flowers will go in this week end I expect.  As you can see there are a few to plant. These are not all the bulbs, just the ones easy to photograph.