Adieu September, welcome October

With the end of September, we bid goodbye to summer, and say hello to fall in earnest. We’ve had to run the furnace the past two mornings. This morning I said to my neighbor that I thought the fall color was a bit late this year. She didn’t think so, and she’s right.

Interesting how memory deceives us. When I checked my photo files – with digital images, the info is there plain as day – the fall color magic doesn’t peak until we get well into October. (The picture here was taken on Oct. 13, 2008 at 7:40 a.m. I won’t bore you with the precise aperture and shutter speed, or the camera and lens I used, but all that info is there to keep my memories straight, since the human brain appears to be hopeless at this.)

I know that my yearning for fall is just my wanting to hurry up all the photo opportunities. It’s been a bit dull here over the past month. September was an odd month weather-wise: warm and dry for the first time this season. We had no rain at all until a couple of days ago. And this odd dry spell came after two extremely wet summers in row.

That meant a good deal of time spent hand watering (with hoses and watering wand) to get 7,000 square feet of grass seed to germinate and grow beside our laneway. This was the last step in a huge landscape transformation project begun last February, described here in my original blog.

I look forward to October and wonder what kind of fall color show the wet summer and dry September will bring.

Here is the Agriculture Canada precipitation map for Ontario for the growing season. We are located in the “very high” area at the tip of Lake Ontario. The weather geek in me loves these maps, and they make very useful garden records. Far more reliable than my memory, that’s for sure.

Related posts:

1. Bring on the fall color – shrubs & trees

Tagged as: fall color