Pictures??

^^ LOL! It isn't sticking anyway - just a yucky drive, and this wasn't a few flakes, this was snow-snow. One of my coworkers said she was in an actual white-out on her route in...yeesh it's only October!

Bloody Hell - I am still only wearing trousers without thermal underwear...nor have I graduated to outside coats yet. It's in the mail though...but my canary plants (nasturtiums) are still lushly romping about the allotment while dahlias are in overdrive.

Lots of autumn sown hardy annuals popping up - pricked out 60 cornflowers and 40 larkspur for plug planting in the clearing.

Yikes! I have the feeling that winter is going to be hard this year. The summer was cooler than normal so the lake is probably cooler than normal too - that means it wouldn't be able to moderate winter conditions to the extent it usually does.... But we haven't even had a killing frost yet, let alone snow!

Temps have dropped to the low 50's here by day, and 40's by night. I've stopped feeding the goldfish in their outdoor pool (too cold for them to digest food) and should bring them into the garage at this point. I've emptied out all the annual flower pots and containers, although many were still clinging to life by a thread, but left the veggie patch to clean out later because deer are still feeding on the 2nd self-seeded crop of mizuna and the tops of my still green and lush (but flowerless because the flowers have been eaten) snapdragons. The lawn grasses keep growing, and we steadfastly are ignoring them. We are DONE mowing for the year, even if the grass reaches waist level. I'm still waiting for a good hard freeze to clean out perennial beds and to collect and burn the wasp and hornet's enormous paper nests. That killing freeze cannot come soon enough to suit me at this time.

It was a cool summer but a really warm September/October, so the water temperatures in Great Lakes are warmer than average. I won't predict whether that means an easy winter, or more lake effect snow for those areas that get it, or what.

No hard frost here yet, maybe a month overdue. But it's five degrees today, so summer is definitely over.

Snowing lightly here today after several days of rain .... still have to clean up leaves YUCK and brrrrr!

stephenjbarath - yeah, it’ll be teresting to see how the unusual fall warmth plays out in winter effects. There haven’t been a lot of storms - at least not yet! - to mix the warmer surface water with the colder layer underneath. The south shore of Lake Ontario gets more lake-effect snow than we do and that warm surface layer might well translate into a snowy early winter there. We only get lake-effect snow here when there is a NE wind coming down the lake. The lake-effect we rely on is the heat-sink effect in the immediate area of the shoreline that turns snow to rain or wet snow that melts off quickly. If the weather is calm, the effect might stay strong, but if we get some early storms that churn up the lake, bringing the cold water back to the surface, it could be a nasty chilly winter here. I don’t like those! :-) Winter is definitely not my favorite season...!

Gotta love that lake effect snow. Lake Mich is 54 degrees and a cold air mass sweeping over it gives that lake effect snow. Better your side if the pond than mine...;-)

tj

Well, I put on the long johns yesterday as I was going to be outside for a lot of the day. I'm still wearing them today! I took down my gazebo cover last week - and that to me really represents the end of summer.

We had snow showers last week but no accumulation in my area. Expecting more tomorrow. Still no killing frost though as perennials look fine.

Heck, my cannas are still blooming (and sending out new ones at that). This season has been strange.