These last few weeks I have been enjoying the abundant colours of the autumn leaves and the daylight hours slowly receding. Life in the slow lane is an exercise in really focusing on the here and now. There is no rush into the future, no need to be anywhere else but here. That in itself is a blessing.
There is little to do in the garden anymore, except raking leaves of course! My goodness how many loads of leaves we have gathered! It was a good thing that we emptied the leaf compost this year, as I doubt it could have held all this mass of stuff otherwise. (And yes, of course I have a separate leaf compost to make the heavenly gardeners gold that leaf compost turns into. It is totally my equivalent of someone else's designer handbag, if you know what I mean.)
The leaves. The masses of leaves this year. How did we manage last year? I don't know if we have more leaves this year than before - the trees and shrubs can't have grown this much in a year can they? - or if my memory is happily skewed like after childbirth when you think well it wasn't all that bad and I could do it again, but this year it really felt as if the raking of leaves has been endless. Poor Alpo who helps me with them has been busy most days of the week. I can only imaging how much he is longing for winter...
I have of course secretly been planting some more bulbs. Just in case... I think this year I maxed in with over a thousand bulbs, but most of that was my Godfathers fault. They ordered two boxes from Holland! I was in heaven when they arrived, and I sincerely can't wait for spring to see the results. Meanwhile I have started deer-proofing the borders for winter. Like in some horror move the deer always come at night and the only way for young trees to stay safe is to stay locked inside some kind of cage.
My darling ducks Lazarus and Goliath have moved to their forever home at Furubacka. The egg-hatching in the incubator succeeded over all expectations, and with 18 new chicks in the winter chicken coop I realised it would be too much to have the ducks too, so they moved to my neighbours with my old lady chickens. “It’s ok Mum, don’t worry” Lazarus told me, “It’s normal for kids to move out and get their own nest when they grow up, and our new home is really wonderful! It has the most enormous duck pond and it’s just a mile away so anytime you miss us you can come say hello.”
With this I shall leave you for now. As we have moved into winter time my blog will as always in winter appear less often instead of the regular once a week, but I shall keep it up at least once a fortnight with country news and gardening thoughts. Wishing you all a happy and sunny November!
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