Rabbit, Rabbit, The Joy of the First Day of a Month

Did you remember to say “rabbit, rabbit” first thing this morning, another 1st day of the month?

It’s for good luck but if you didn’t say it, I think you’re going to be okay this month. At least I hope so because I didn’t say it right away.

Oops.

I do love the first day of a month.

I flip the page on my wall calender and there’s the proverbial clean slate that makes it seem like anything is possible. I’m no psychologist—far from one—but I do believe they’ve done studies to show that we all love to start things on the first of the month.

I think in October, I’ll restart my daily walking habit only because today I found time in the afternoon to go for a walk, so I’m off to a good start. 100% in October!

I’ll also start a practice of doing something every day in the garden because today I did two things in the garden. I picked a bunch of tomatoes—mostly cherry tomatoes but there were a couple of bigger ones—and I cleaned the honeylocust leaves off the patio. (If I don’t clean them up, I just track them inside as I come and go.)

Check and done, but hardly a stretch goal because I usually do something in the garden every day.

What else can I do to make October a great month? I have a few ideas, both in and out of the garden.

One thing I will do soon is take cuttings from my African blue basil (picture of the bloom above) and root them to grow as temporary houseplants. Why bother, you ask? It’s not easy to find this particular basil for sale so when I found it at a local greenhouse two springs ago, I snapped it up. Then I rooted cuttings last fall and successfully overwintered them.

I’ll do the same this year.

By the way, one of the tricks I used to ensure I ended up with a few good plants in the spring is when the cuttings got really tall, and it was still winter, I cut them back and rooted those cuttings, just to be sure I would have plants that made it all the way to spring.

Three cuttings survived the winter. The others succumbed mostly to my forgetting to water them. I’m going to solve that watering problem this winter by putting the cuttings where I’ll see them all the time, instead of where I had them last year.

If I complain on this blog post about losing my African blue basil due to overwatering… well, I won’t.

I also have a goal to enjoy as much time outdoors as I can in October. I don’t see a frost in the extended forecast (the next 10 days) but I know that frost is coming. It’s like walking on railroad tracks. You know eventually a train is going to come barreling down those tracks straight toward you. When it does, be ready.

Same with frost. It’s coming straight at us, so be ready!