Farewell to Summer

On 5 May we put in a fair effort around the garden. The major parts of this were:

• shifting all the azaleas, and some other pot plants into Frances' potting shed;
• pulling out all the frost sensitive vegetables (and hanging the tomato plants with fruit upside down in the potting shed; and 
• pruning all the berries.

The pruning involving raspberries and boysenberries came under the heading of "hours of fun" since once finished I spent a fair bit of time removing the prickles from most every body part not covered by thick clothing.  The only bit of this I photographed was this attractive blue plant.(see comments for discussion of this)

On the morning of the 6th of May our efforts were justified as there was a very solid frost.  One of Frances' friends reported at their gym that they had recorded -4C in the morning.  Our birdbath was pretty solid

and the lawn was white.

This event made me contemplate my childhood in England where my Dad was a commercial market gardener.  He used to distinguish ground frosts and air frosts.  In more recent times the TV weatherman has talked about there being a frost when the temperature got to +2C which puzzled me until I read that a temperature of +2C at a standard weather station (some feet off the ground) is equivalent to 0C at ground level.  Thus +2C is a ground frost and 0C is an air frost!  I will leave it to any US residents reading this to do their own conversions to Fahrenheit (as may Swiss or Italian cheesemakers readers in respect of Reaumur).

On the morning of 8 May the lawn sprinklers fired up as intended at 6 - 8am.   This is because there has effectively been no rain since early March and we do need a bit of liquid on the lawn.  However the liquid also hit the trees as shown by this 8:30 image of the pin-oak leaves.