Saying Goodbye to Summer...

I cleaned out our flowerbeds this weekend.   With only a few exceptions, all our plants had been frostbitten and were looking not so pretty anymore.  As much as I dislike winter, I can't deny that it will arrive at some point lol, and I figured it was time to get this part of our yard ready for the pending cold. I figured it out the other day that we enjoyed watching our plants grow for over 5 months...not too bad for the Prairies!

At the end of September, while things were still growing, I snapped a few shots of our flowers...I'd say our rookie year was a success :)

 The pots on our front step... I loved coming up the walk and seeing all the color...

 I will definitely plant the front bed differently next year... It looked nice but it certainly didn't have the "pop" that the back bed did...live and learn :)

 

These were the pots on the back deck...when I look back at photos of how small the plants were that these started from...such an incredible process :)

 Our back flower bed turned out even better than I had dreamed..it ended up as a mass of color, where you could hardly tell where one plant ended and the next one began :) 

This delphinium actually got blown over in a bad storm mid summer and the single stalk broke... then over the next few weeks the base just kept growing and before long we had 5 new stalks blossoming!  This is one of my favorite flowers in our garden...

This dahlia plant was one of the plants that had been chowed down on by a mouse and eaten nearly to the ground...a little fertilizer later and it was bigger than a basketball with blossoms almost as big as my fist! 

 

So much color...exactly what I had envisioned that first weekend in May when we planted these tiny flowers...

So long summer...