Thursday 15 November 2012

Fallen leaves and watery sunshine

My garden is rapidly filling up with leaves, mostly from my Maple tree. They are congregating in big drifts in every conceivable corner:


The shrub with the glowing golden leaves is the "Midwinter Fire" Dogwood. Just to its right, next to the shed is another Dogwood which has already *shed* its leaves:


A bit further along the back fence is my Fennel, now cut down to about 15", but still acting as a leaf-trap


The Callicarpa has lost most of its leaves now, adding to the general carpet of decaying foliage and highlighting the purple berries:


We have had a couple of nice sunny days recently, but the Autumn sunlight is weak and watery, and with the sun being low in the sky it tends to spotlight a particular area of my garden rather than covering all of it at once.

Rosemary bushes in the spotlight

Purple Sprouting Broccoli in the spotlight

The "Sunset Boulevard" Rose is incredibly producing new buds. Doesn't it know it's November???


Whilst the Rose doesn't know when to stop flowering, the bulbs are over-eager to make their entry. Some of the Crocus bulbs I planted in September have decided to come up already. How do I persuade them that they need to wait a few months?? Make the weather turn cold, I suppose...


There's not much happening on the Veg front just now, but here's a token offering...

Webbs Wonderful lettuce are pretty hardy and will survive well enough unless we get some very low temperatures. Many of mine are under the cloches, but there wasn't room for all of them.


The growth of the "Golden Ball" turnips has slowed down dramatically. One of them is probably big enough to be harvested, but the others are still not much bigger than a large radish.


No, that one is NOT the size of a Swede, it's just an illusion!

With things slowing down in the garden I will probably shift the emphasis of my blog to food and cookery matters for a while, so I'm off now to do a bit of menu-planning.

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P.S.  Do any of you use Networked Blogs?  I've just added their Widget to my Blogger page, so why not use it to link your blog with mine?


5 comments:

  1. My blog is on networked blogs but all I did was add my blog - I haven't done anything else with it.

    We're still getting roses too!

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  2. Those purple berries are stunning.I will have to investigate that plant I think!

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  3. Some very autumnal scenes there. The roses here surprise me each year, flowering almost til Christmas.

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  4. Are you going to make some 'black gold dust' out of all your leaves? The other day I got some chicken wire twirled it round two bits of metal pipe, and then stuffed loads of leaves inside the narrow tube shaped container; doused the whole lot with water before placing a heavy stone on the top. I've read it takes about a year for the leaves to rot down and turn into a fine black soil improver aka black gold - can't wait! :)

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    1. Hi Anon; Yes, I certainly am going to make some "black gold dust" as you call it. As it happens, I have a compost bin full of 2-year-old leaves right now, which I will probably put to use very soon, so that I can scoop up this year's haul. I find that even when the leaves are thoroughly wet (and I do occasionally water inside the bin), the leaves take well over a year to decompose. 2 years is about average.

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