Fall is slowly creeping in here, with the leaves on some of the trees turning and falling. Many of the trees here are Live Oaks though, so they’ll keep their leaves until spring, when the new leaves will push the old ones off the trees. Our yard has mainly a southern variety of weeping Ash trees and a Poplar tree (plus palm trees of various types), so we’ll be dealing with fallen leaves for a bit longer. The grass is mostly dormant at this point, so we’re only mowing once every 2-3 weeks. Things are looking pretty dry, so I’m hoping we get some rain soon.
The monarch butterflies are pretty much gone by now as well – they pass through here on their southerly migrations, so we get a good number of them. They’re one of the reasons I really love my butterfly garden in the fall. Sadly my salvias don’t seem to be doing well – I will try giving the garden a good watering, but they just don’t seem to be making it right now. Which is sad, as they were huge and gorgeous.
We also had a cold front this week, so some of the less hardy potted plants are coming inside. We need to build a drape frame for our lime tree as well, since it’s now too big to keep in a pot, and will need to be sheltered if it actually gets cold. Our lows this week are in the lower 40F range, so some of the tropicals definitely need to join the dumcane inside the porch. This will be interesting with the plumeria, which has gotten so large that we’ve put it’s pot on a wheeled platter. I’m not sure it will fit through the porch door, but I guess we’ll find out!
The lizards know where the warms are and have been attempting at cost to life and limb to get inside the house or screen porch. Unfortunately the cats think they’re both fun and tasty, so we’ve found a few corpses and made a few rescues so far. That will likely continue through the winter.
It’s probably time to get the bird feeders up as well. (Or the squirrel feeders, really) There won’t be any more hummingbirds this year for sure; we only saw two all summer, which was sad. Usually there are tons. I wonder if the climate is affecting their migration, or maybe we didn’t have the feeders up soon enough or something. I love having birds in the yard, especially when it’s cold – we’ve had breeding pairs of cardinals and bluejays for a few years now. The wrens usually make a nest in the yard (or in the wreath on my door), but I’ve yet to find a seed they’ll eat. I think they’re more interested in the bugs living in my potted plants.
I’m not planting a winter garden this year, mostly because things were too crazy when I would have needed to get it planted. Instead, we’ll compost the garden plot with leaves and kitchen compost over the winter. It could stand to rest for a little bit anyway, especially since we planted corn this summer. I don’t think I’ll grow corn again, just because it takes up a lot of space for not a lot of produce in the end. Maybe one more try now that I’ve done it before, but I’m not sold on corn as a backyard crop.
The days are approaching their shortest now, and the sun has already set when I get home from work at 5:30. The sun is about 15 minutes shy of rising when I get to work at 6:30am. Having it be dark when I leave and dark when I get home is hard, but at least I still get some afternoon sun on my commute home.
Little Druid on the Prairie 
The cold is always a good reason to snuggle up with a loved one in front of a fireplace with some hot chocolate. 🙂
Also, just remember that the sun will return soon enough and bring life back to the Land. 🙂
Blessings,
Victoria
*laughs* the Sun hasn’t gone anywhere! I live in southeast Texas. “Cold” is when the lows are in the 40’s and highs are in the 60’s (Where I live, most winters, it never goes below freezing at all, ever). Winter is probably the nicest time of year to live here, and Summer is insufferable and everything shrivels up and dies. It’s really contrary to the way that people celebrate the Wheel of the Year, as I mentioned in my post: https://swampdruid.wordpress.com/2012/11/03/it-might-be-samhain-on-the-calendar-but-my-garden-disagrees/
It’s something I’m working on how to balance, because it means my work with the Nature Spirits is a little bit backwards of what I do with the ADF style seasons and holidays. (The days certainly get shorter in winter, and it does get “colder”, but the “barren” time of year here is June-August.)
ADF emphasizes a connection to the Land on which we live, so it would be acceptable to adapt the Wheel of the Year to your climate. This is what I did when I started with a Hellenic hearth culture, as the Mediterranean has a much different climate than the Midwestern US!
Blessings,
Victoria
I know. I’m just not sure how to synchronize the two in a way that makes sense. The Solstices and Equinoxes are easy enough, since they’re solar, and the sun waxes and wanes here just like anywhere. Maybe I’m just too steeped in practicing as a Neopagan, but our secular holidays like the December Holidays and Halloween (or the secular equivalents, like Easter) seem to make sense even when they’re separate from how the growing seasons work here. And sadly, there’s not much known about how the native people who originally lived here celebrated anything (they weren’t particularly hospitable to trade or visitors…) so I can’t look there for inspiration. I figure at least for now, I can be connected to the Land and to the Gods in a meaningful way, and let the Holy Day celebrations match with as much of both as possible, and if not, match well with one or the other.
I personally have honored completely different Deities for High Days than the ones suggested in the Dedicant’s Guide in order to be more connected to the Land. For example, I honored Aphrodite at Beltane, even though Hellenic culture generally honored Apollo and Artemis. I justified my reasoning in my essay for the explanation of the High Day. My mentor said it was perfectly fine. Just throwing stuff out there to think about.
Blessings!
Oh definitely! I actually did that (somewhat) for Samhain (most Celtic hearth Samhain rituals seem to honor The Daghda and the Morrigan, I honored Donn and the Cailleach). But I still did a ritual that honored the Dead, for Samhain. It just feels right, I guess. I’m definitely going to put some thought around how to celebrate the four “fire” festivals though – Imbolc is the onset of spring here, and Beltaine is the onset of summer, so maybe I’ll take that spin on it. I can still honor Brigit for Imbolc, just emphasize the spring part over the “hope of spring” part, if that makes sense. I will definitely say, living where I do, that I get a really good connection to the Summer Solstice though. Nothing like that beating summer sun!