getting the garden ready for winter

Well I promised I would be regular in updates so it’s not my fault if it’s not necessarily exciting.  Today, I started cleaning out the garden.  I was going to take a photo of it, but all it looks like is dirt because the way to get ready for winter is pretty much to cut everything down to the ground almost.  At least everything I have is cut-able.  I have to do something special for my passion flower vine or it won’t make it.  I think I need to cover the bottom of it with burlap or something.  There is something cool, however, about cutting everything down to nothing almost and knowing that it is snoozing under the ground and it will come back in the spring, maybe even bigger than it was this year.  I’m sure there’s a spiritual metaphor in there we’ve all heard a hundred times, so I won’t go into it; I’ll just mention it.  I suppose it could be a metaphor for sin, but I prefer to think that it is a metaphor for death and resurrection.  I have some geraniums that aren’t dead even though we’ve had a frost.  I think I’ll leave them and see what happens.  I have a pretty certain feeling that they won’t make it, but it’ll be interesting.  We had dusty millers at the other house that were supposed to be annuals, but they came back for 5 years.  So… you never know.  We have snapdragons this summer that didn’t do a whole lot all summer, but they are still green and bushy even after a frost, so you never know there either.  That’s why gardening is cool.  It’s kind of a gamble, and kind of a certainty (if you’re good at it, which I’m not).  But it’s always surprising, to me at least.  And often pleasantly so.