Late Autumn

Suddenly, we have full on Autumn.

Frosts in the mornings, and in the last two weeks the trees have gone from a wonderful sunlit yellow to sparse and bare, like pencil strokes against the sky and this weekend we've been lighting the wood stove in the evenings - first time this year.

The days are still warm, climbing to the mid teens after a freezing start, and making gardening incredibly pleasant. Yesterday cleared off most of the weeds from the sadly neglected top veggie patch, cut back the raspberries, dug in a mixture of compost and sheep poo, and started covering the dug over areas with bagasse and newspaper, only to discover that I had only half as much as I thought.

By then it was late afternoon, and too late to go and get more bagasse. Called it a day, soaked in the bath to get rid of the dust and sugar cane fibres, and then sat and read some more of Peter Fleming's To Peking while drinking tea and watching the sun go down and the afternoon turn to dusk