Saturday, September 27, 2014

Tired but moving forward...

Bees on purple asters
I know it has been almost a month since I posted! I am still getting used to my full course load at university,  juggling the night shift job, while trying to keep up with the house/yard work. Schoolwork is going well, but everything else has suffered. Dinners have become snacking nights instead of sit down meals, I am sleeping with a load of clean laundry, and dishes pile up when we run out of paper plates, but I finally did two barrels worth of weeding! My youngest has been doing well with her driving, so she is running me to the grocery or library. Everyone is pitching in, but schedules have to be posted on our dry erase calendar just so we can figure out where & what we are all doing.

Swallowtail butterfly
After weeding the front garden I filled in the empty spaces with some new purple asters, sedum, tickseed, a daylilly and a small hyssop. These new plants are primarily, for wild bee feeding before winter. So far they have been visited by bumblebees, carpenter bees, and native Missouri bees eagerly sampling these new nectar sources. Unfortunately, I am not seeing many European honeybees this season. As for other nectar feeders, the Swallowtail butterflies are prevalent, but the Monarch butterflies are scarce this year.

A Fall chill has started; the geese are flying over the house in V-formation and a few trees are starting to color their foliage. This year seems to be winding down at a breakneck pace. Evenings have low temps around 58F/14C, so we run the attic fan through the night to cool the house; daytime temps are still about 80F/26C. Overall, the weather is very pleasant,... perfect for studying on the porch.