The Hostas are Gone

 The Hostas are gone.  I know this fact will not interest you in the least, since you do not have hostas outside your window!  But perhaps there is something else in your own yard or neighbourhood that you use as a beacon of the changing seasons.  For me, the two huge hostas outside our living room window where I sit every morning while finishing my coffee are a huge part of the changing seasons.

This is my up close view.  The hostas are already changing their colours to yellow.  The stake in the foregroud is an old Milkweed stem.

A few days later the colour has faded almost completely to yellow.  There are actually eight hosta plants within my view, but all of them except the two very big ones are hidden from my view in summer behind or underneath the leaves of these two.  You can see a few pale stems of one of them in the upper right.

I chose the two most obvious leaves right in front of my eyes for comparison.  Here is the first pair.

And this is the second.  After this Mrs. F.G. and our gardener had a clean-up day and clipped them all off.  In all cases, this is the change in 24 hours.

I was left with just this, all to soon to be covered with that white stuff!  A comment in the last post suggested leaving the leaves on the garden.  In fact we do, we have done no raking yet.  Next week our gardener will return to rake and mulch the leaves on the grass, and then they will be added to the garden too.  In fact he may rake and mulch a few leaves on the closest part of the golf course (they are our leaves after all) and add those in addition.

I should add that Mrs. F.G. has put enormous effort into enriching the soil in our garden.  She uses a number of amendments, from alfalfa pellets to worm castings.  She uses no chemical fertilizers.  

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APOLOGIES!

I have to apologize for not leaving many comments when I visit your blogs.  google is upset with me these days and will often not let me sign in when trying to leaves comments.  Sorry, I will remedy this as soon as I can!