Well, apart from a chilly August, summer hasn’t been too
bad. September was dry and, although
showers started to creep in early in October, the first week of this month was
mostly quite pleasant with a couple of outdoor lunches. But this week has been wet, cool and
miserable, with low cloud all day – November come early. The leaves have started falling from the ash
trees (the plum tree has been bare for a week or two now).
It has been a good year for fruit in general, with lots of
hips, haws and elderberries as well as cultivated fruit. But why can’t I see any ash keys in the
trees? Is this ash dieback taking hold?
The weather is gradually toppling the cosmos, and the salpiglossis,
asters and larkspur are pretty much finished.
The zinnias produced about four flowers between them and I’m not sure I
was sufficiently impressed to want to bother next year; the didiscus was also
something of a non-event although I might give them another try and pinch them
out earlier. The sweet peas have been
sown in pots, and I have lots of sweet william, forget-me-nots and bellis to be
planted out, as well as red wallflowers.
The front garden has been almost entirely ripped up and
re-gravelled; I’ve started replanting the borders under the front wall
(Brunnera ‘Jack Frost’, narcissus ‘Jenny’ and crocus ‘Blue Pearl’, with a
seedling hellebore) but there’s still plenty of space for new ideas, as well as
some weeds still to be removed under the ‘Blush Noisette’ rose, which has
remained in place. The space over by the
holly tree and along the hedge, which was always intended to be an open area,
has also been dug out and now needs some weed-suppressant on it (once the rain stops
…). The borders between that and the
house will need reworking and there should be some scope for better planting!
Down in the vegetable garden, the runner beans are finally
running out of steam (the freezer is full of them) and the courgettes are also
slowing down. I’ve sown some late
Chinese salad greens and prepared a trench for autumn-sown broad beans.
Ginger lily in flower |
The birds are sorting themselves out for the winter. We have a lot of robins; one, the last to get
its adult plumage, has taken over the patio, while there are several others in
different parts of the garden, all singing to each other over territory. The sparrows are still plentiful, and the
occasional blackbird and great tit turn up, as does a wren. I’ve seen hardly any finches for some time,
probably because we’ve had an outbreak of trichomonosis in the village
(pigeons, which carry the disease, are still very much around, nesting in the
holly tree and producing large and demanding young). There
has been a flock of long-tailed tits around, also a couple of nuthatches, and
two red kites have been seen overhead.
The pheasants are gradually turning up in the garden, although the
shooting hasn’t begun yet; one day we had a whole parade of them through the
garden but usually it’s the odd one or two, sometimes with a partridge in
tow. The wet weather has probably seen off
the last of the butterflies, or forced those that hibernate into their winter
quarters; there was a red admiral around the other day and a couple of dragonflies
last week but there has been less and less obvious (desirable) insect life
recently.