With the clocks turned back on Saturday, the days are frightfully short. Darkness descends by 5:30 p.m., coming one minute sooner each day until the winter solstice on December 21, the day I look forward to every year. That's when things start to turn around with the daylight slowly increasing until glorious springtime.

Meanwhile, fall is making way for the desolation of winter. I haven't even begun to rake up the leaves yet. But there are still surprises to be found in the garden. While cleaning out the pond and tidying up the backyard, I was amazed to still find beautiful peppers like these in November. The temperatures have remained moderate enough to keep these beauties growing. I don't think the harvest will continue much longer, though, as we are supposed to drop below freezing tonight. I may have to pick the last few and use them to make stuffed peppers this weekend.

And yes, those are the last of the Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes, brought inside green and slowly ripening up for that one last "summer salad."

The summer is ending; the days grow shorter as the earth moves towards the autumnal equinox. The bounty is winding down. The tomatoes are small, the carrots tough and woody. But abundant beauty is still to be found in the end-of-summer garden as these photographs will show. I hope you enjoy them.

Arugula leaves begin to change color

The lovely symmetry of a banana plant leaf

The leaves of a thornless blackberry vine

The star-shaped leaf cluster of a basil plant

One gorgeous red pepper

I saw something disturbing in nature this morning—what looked like a peregrine falcon with its prey, a young robin. The mother robin bravely flew at the falcon to try to rescue her young, but it was hopeless. He was three times her size.

Now I know that hawks and falcons are meat eaters, but there is something really disturbing about a bird killing and eating its own kind. If he had caught a squirrel (aka tree rat), I would have probably congratulated him and offered to take him out for a beer, but hearing that helpless robin's cries and seeing the mother's hysteria just left me with a bad feeling for the cruelty of nature. Guess I'm just being sentimental.

The day's bounty from the garden

This is the time of the summer when the toil of spring planting begins to pay off in dividends of bountiful fruits and flowers. Summer squash, onions and pole beans have been providing the dinner vegetable for the last week and I've even managed to pick a couple of handfuls of blackberries before the birds and squirrels got to them. Abundant basil has provided the first of many pesto preparations. Soon tomatoes, beets, cucumbers and peppers will add to the harvest.

There is nothing like going out to the garden and picking out what will become the evening's dinner or the next day's zucchini cake and blackberry pie. Everything is coming along well, despite my annoying habit of planting everything too close together. Unfortunately, I've just spotted the first of the Japanese beetles. These destructive pests will decimate my beans especially, and I foresee many hours of handpicking the beetles and plopping them into a jar of white vinegar. I don't use traps, as that tends to draw more of them from the area. Hopefully, I wil be able to keep up with the infestation and not lose all my bean harvest.

My dear friend Keith Butler is as industrious as he is generous with his time. So when he volunteered to help me rebuild my backyard pond, I hesitated, knowing what a gargantuous project it would turn out to be. "Are you SURE you want to do this?" I asked him over and over. He assured me that he was, so off we went to the home store for the liner, a kiddie pool to hold the old pond water and tools.

The old pond was an odd shape, rounded to look like a natural woodland pond, and it was notoriously hard to clean and care for. Nearly the width of the yard, there was little room to get around it and the unfinished river rock border was unsteady and begininning to fall apart from years of settling. We decided to turn it into a rectangle with a slate border, flat and level to the surrounding ground and with plenty of room to get to all four sides for cleaning.

Unfortunately, the ground was a rock-hard clay and the massive tree roots encroaching from the neighbors' yard made the job incredibly difficult. We had decided against buying a pickaxe (a bad move), so the digging went slowly. I'm afraid I was not much help, being unfit and out of shape from sitting at the computer most of the day, so the majority of the hard work fell on Keith's shoulders.

Since the new pond was deeper than the old one, we wound up with about three cubic yards of crappy clay soil piled four feet high on the patio and nowhere to go with it. Calls to local excavators proved to be an expensive venture, so I got the bright idea to hold a sidewalk sale to help pay for the expenses. The sale would mean more work for me, lifting and carrying furniture up from the basement, and also that I wouldn't be able to help Keith with the massive job of moving the humongous dirt pile to the alley behind the house to allow easy access for a front end loader. I stubbornly insisted that I could handle both jobs, so Saturday morning I filled the sidewalk with the sundry items and unfinished projects that have been taking up valuable space in my basement. Most of the furniture had been acquired through my skills as a trash-picker so whatever I made would be pure profit. 

Business was slow at first, it being the Fourth of July holiday, but things picked up in the afternoon. One gentleman asked if I had any old cabinets or tools and I invited him to shop the basement to see if there was anything he liked. As we passed the pond project, he asked what we were going to do with the pile of dirt on the patio. Turned out he was an excavator and he offered to come the next morning and remove the dirt for $40, about $140 less than the estimated we had gotten by phone. Not only did I sell the man an old cabinet for $25 but our dilemma with the dirt pile was solved as well. The Lord sure moves in mysterious ways.

By Sunday morning, the pond was finished and our only job was to load the dirt pile into the front end loader. The rest of the afternoon Keith and I lolled on the front porch reading the New York Times and nursing our sore muscles. The weekend had been exhausting for both of us and Keith was anxious to get back home to his apartment in New York City. Little by little the items on the sidewalk were paid for and taken off to their new homes. I had made enough money in the sale to pay for the pond expenses plus a bus ticket home for Keith, making it a successful weekend all around. Would I do it again? Well. . . let me get back to you on that.

My next-door neighbor Joyce Kurtz has the most extraordinarily beautiful Peace rose. Yesterday's showers made it even more lovely, so out came the macro lense again.

The subtle gradations of color from pale pink to warmest yellow are magnified in the raindrops. This has been one of the best springs in memory for roses, and this beauty will continue showing off its' blooms until September.

I am so fortunate to have Joyce as a neighbor and friend, not only for her lovely roses but for her kindness and thoughtfulness in all that she does. At Christmastime she bakes the best cookies and shares them with all her neighbors, and I, for one, look forward with anticipation to that time each year. She treats me just like a part of her family.

Her husband, Ed, was the garden keeper and I still miss my long talks with him about everything from how to grow the best tomatoes to controlling the yearly influx of Japanese beetles (he used a jar of kerosene and I use a jar of white vinegar). He knew I hated the squirrels (aka Tree Rats) who wreak havoc on the garden and my potted plants and would patiently listen to my ranting tirades. June 28 will mark the fourth year anniversary of his death following a bout with cancer. My heart always goes out to Joyce as the end of June draws near, as I know she still misses her best friend and companion of some 50 years.

I made Ed a promise before he died that I would cut the grass and care for the garden for Joyce, but I admit I am sadly lacking in his instinctive gardening skills. Their front lawn has gone from the pride of the neighborhood to a sorry patch of withered grass and thriving dandelions, the result of my setting the lawnmower blades too low to the ground. I have my work cut out for me and would appreciate any advice on how to rid the weeds and bring back the lush lawn of old. 

I don't think I've ever really taken a closeup look at a tomato leaf unfurling as it grows. Yesterday I took the macro lense out to the budding garden and captured these incredible photographs of a bug's-eye-view of the lovely leaf in all of its glory.

A few days of sun has really helped the tomatoes and peppers. I was beginning to think all the rain and cool weather would start to rot the roots, but it looks like all the vegetables will survive. As usual, I have planted things too closely and the zucchini and summer squash will grow to shadow the beets and carrots. I always seem to forget how big these garden giants become.

I'm trying a new heirloom tomato this year called "Hillbilly." It produces a yellow fruit with red stripes. I like the yellow tomatoes for slicing and eating rather than the red ones, which will go for sandwiches and sauce.

Late spring always brings dozens of pink and crimson blooms to my climbing roses but this year the vines are especially loaded, as you can see from the photo. And take a look at the first of the June-bearing strawberries. No more paying high prices at the grocery store for mediocre fruits for the next month as these babies continue to produce about a quart a day.

The sugar snap peas, pole beans and squash are all strong and healthy, but the peppers and tomatoes are looking a bit peaked. I think those temperature dips into the 30s a week ago did more harm than good, and if we don't get some sun soon they may not have enough time to recover.

Now if I could only get it to stop raining for one day. . .

If anyone can make a defense for a flower more beautiful than a tulip, go ahead and have at it.

Enjoy these as I have.

My sister Evelyn lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and for the most part loves it, but there are two things she really misses about Pennsylvania—the changing leaves in the fall and the lilacs in the spring. I would have to agree. There is little else to compare with the heady fragrance of a lilac in bloom.

While walking through my garden after the rain today, I spotted these delicate buds just forming on my two lilac bushes and rushed inside for the camera. It's hard to believe that each of these buds is smaller than a fingernail yet packed with such fragile beauty and intricate texture. So these are for you, Effie, in the hope that you can come north next April to experience them in full bloom for yourself.

George Washington grew lilacs, and since the bushes can grow to be hundreds of years old, there may arill be one surviving out there. Washington supposedly has slept in half the homes and inns around Philadelphia, so it just might bear out that one of his lilac bushes lives on. 

Speaking of lilacs, The Morning Call had a great article by Diane Stoneback in the Sunday travel section about the Lilac Capital, Rochester, New York (Blooming lilacs!). Check it out if you can't get enough of these early spring beauties.