We finally got the hoses coiled up and put away, and the outdoor water turned off. (Thank God I'm not the one who has to go down in the crawl space to do that!) Not long after came the first snowfall - a swirl of lovely big flakes on a Saturday morning, transforming the landscape but not sticking to the road, an ideal snow. (The only thing better is a weekday snow that shuts down work.)
So now it's official - the outdoor gardening season is pretty much over. Nothing much to do until February, when it's time to think about pruning. Or rather, nothing much to do outdoors.
Indoors, as always around our house, there's much to be done in the way of gardening. Major transplanting is needed! The peppers and eggplants we started from seed a couple of months back are doing amazingly well, given the small 4-inch pots they've been confined to. All of the pepper plants have peppers on them. We have bell peppers, poblanos, and sweet banana peppers. The eggplants are at the blooming stage, with lovely pale purple flowers. All these plants are amazingly forgiving, but they really, really need to be in bigger pots! And now that John has a new Sunstation design, we can better accommodate those plants that need a lot of growing space. Sadly, we will never have enough indoor space for all the plants we've started, once they're approaching maturity. So some winnowing, as well as transplanting, will have to be done.