Thanksgiving Long Weekend at the Farm

 Hello dear friends, and Happy Thanksgiving to all of our Canadian friends!

As always we like to take this week as a vacation week.  The gardens always need an end of season clean up and I often order my spring bulbs to be planted at this time of year.  Gardening friends I have been very disciplined this year (mostly disciplined this year!) and have not ordered any bulbs at all.  I really feel that I need to spend at least a year cleaning the gardens before rewarding myself with a new supply of luscious spring bulbs!

Our little garden privy is one of my favourite things to photograph.  The leaves are changing colour and we have a glorious show of yellows, golds, oranges and reds at the farm.

Sugar maples put on the most amazing fall display.  We have many mature sugar maples at the farm but we have never tapped them for syrup.  In the spring we see many of our neighbours tapping their trees.  Maple syrup is a lovely treat!

This is Millicent and she guards the stone staircase.  I love collecting statuary to scatter throughout the gardens.  We purchased all of our statues from a local shop which sadly closed down earlier this summer.

As we are at home we have been sending the sheep across the road for pasture during the day.  The sheep are excited to head across the road for several hours of grazing and then are excited to come back home again.

Abby is trying very had to be a good sheep herding dog.  She has a strong herding instinct but is still quite immature and makes "mistakes"...some days more than others!  Some shepherds refer to the desire to chase and nip as "flossing their teeth".  We find that Abby is the most focused if she is the only dog, when we bring Lucy along chaos generally ensues.

I keep watch for traffic while waiting for Abby to gather up the sheep.  The area that we live in is very rolling and although the posted speed limit on our section of road is only 50 kph many cars fly by at at a much higher rate of speed.  Luckily we dont have much traffic here.  The hills make it difficult to see oncoming cars and we definitely don't want any accidents.  This is a view of part of our property from the road.

A view towards the rear of the house from the end of our driveway,

This Annabelle hydrangea needs to be relocated to another area.  I have several varieties of hydrangeas at the farm but seem to only have success with this variety.  

We enjoyed a family Thanksgiving dinner here on Saturday and I received this stunning floral collection from my sister in law.  Thank you Cass!

This metal bird house has been perched at the top of our water fall garden for several years and has never attracted a bird.

On the other hand this acorn bird house has received a lot of interest and the log bird feeder is very popular every winter.  We fill the holes in the feeder with suet mixed with bird seeds.

Abby turned 2 years old yesterday!

Another one of my statues.  I have been meaning to move it to one of the gardens but here it is, several years later, sitting on our stone wall.

A view towards the south west.  We are fortunate to be surrounded by forests in all directions.

This is one of the sugar maples we had ordered from Maple Leaves Forever.  This organization works to promote the planting of native tree species.  The trees are sold as small saplings about 18-24" tall and are distributed through specialty nurseries.  These trees are now about 6 feet tall and we have had them about 5 years.  We planted them along a new driveway that we made when we had our addition built.

The annuals I had planted earlier this summer are thriving in the fall temperatures.  We have already has several frosts but the snaps, petunias and dahlias are all still doing very well.

Each year these large puff mushrooms appear in the same section of our lawn.

My little garden shed.

Our new fire pit with the sheep in the distance. So far we have only been able to enjoy it once but if the weather holds we might be able to enjoy a glass of wine around the fire once or twice more before we pack the furniture away.

The plants at the koi pond are starting to die back.  The water is getting cooler and the koi are starting to slow down.

It will soon be time to start loading up the bird feeders.  Hopefully the black squirrels that plagued us last year found another home!

A little patch of sunflowers in the garden.

A view of the back of our house.

Golden leaves.

We added succulents to our stone wall this year and will look forwarding to see them thriving in the crevices.

And finally some freshly baked bread to make sandwiches from our left over turkey and ham.

~Thank you for visiting!~