Autumn light

It’s just after 5pm and light is leaving the sky, the inevitable effect of the clocks going back and the beginning of the dark months of winter. But we’ve been blessed with a glorious autumn day and I’ve spent most of it in the garden and allotment. I cut back my runner beans which seemed to be finished for the year, leaving the sweet peas which clamber up between the beans. They should survive until the first hard frost:

I also cleared out the cucumber bed. The cucumbers have been awesome but have now stopped growing. I raked over the soil, planted some onions and some salad seeds and covered it with a cloche. This bed is in the sunniest part of the garden at this time of year so something might survive over the winter:

Bella agrees that this is the sunniest part of the garden:

Other flowers in bloom in today’s sunshine (apart from Bella) included a lovely self seeded poppy, the endlessly flowering red scabious, which also had a bee at one point but not in this photo, and nasturtiums scrambling up the back hedge

The allotment was also bathed in light and flowers but I forgot to take any photos, having spent most of my time there on my hands and knees, howking couch grass out from underneath the strawberries – which also had some unseasonal flowers.

I made it back to the house just as the sun was setting and just in time to fix a ‘found’ plastic bottle to the guttering which collects rain water from the shed to fill my water butt. This was needed to replace a funnel which had disintegrated earlier in the week:

It’s been a lovely and productive day, despite the light disappearing so early.