Vol.2 #139
September 28, 2001

    Once again another growing season has passed.  Believe it or not, Christmas will be over with in a mere 3 months.  Just as lush shades of green excite us in the spring, harvest colors of orange, burgundy, and even "corn stalk khaki" bring that feeling of rejuvenation to us as fall arrives.  The thrill of the search for the perfectly shaped pumpkin, hot apple cider, cool days, life gets no better!

    The above photo shows a display our nursery folks have put together combining pumpkins, straw bales, gourds, and corn stalk bundles with normal nursery statuary and fall mums.  This is a festive time to be creative.  At my children's' daycare center they would always do a big haunted house production.  At Roxbury, we replaced a sink in our bathroom which was stamped 1927 - old porcelain with chrome handle and a white porcelain button in the center of the handle marked "C" for cold.  I would put this sink atop a large plastic planter with no drain holes, connect a re-circulating pump (as used in your water garden) to the bottom of the spigot, and put water in the planter along with 2 packs of Black Cherry KoolAid and 1 pack of Cherry KoolAid.  The kids could turn the spigot on and off, and see an instant "blood bath".  The kids loved it.

    In the small town where I grew up, we covered the whole town on Halloween night.  The one house we would not approach was one with overgrown bushes and wooden siding which was grayed from lack of paint and weather.  We knew a little old lady lived there alone though no one ever had the nerve to peek into the bushes to see.  Word was that she was a witch!  Adolescence brings many changes to kids including new found courage, sometimes beyond reason.  One year we knocked on the lady's door and she was elated to have Trick Or Treaters - a rare treat or her.  She gave us generous handfuls of  loose Candied Corn, as she had plenty of candy and few visitors.  Those were the days when loose, unpackaged candy was not suspect.  We ate the candy and it did not kill us!  I made a point to visit this lonesome lady occasionally when delivering my afternoon papers from that point forward.  I'm not sure if this was because I liked her, or maybe I was soothing my own guilty conscience for thinking she was a witch for all those years.  She was a very nice lady.

    What's this got to do with gardening.  Nothing really beyond the fact that gardening is a great place to reflect upon life.  Honestly, our local newspaper columnist told me the 1st column would be easy to write, the 100th would come the hardest.  This may be the case this week.  I promise I won't deviate too often, but I hoped you've enjoyed the stories.