“We know that in September, we will wander through the warm winds of summer's wreckage. We will welcome summer's ghost. “ Henry Rollins
The autumnal equinox – equal lengths of night and day - is on the 23rd. After that I feel that winter is getting nearer. The winds and rain of the last few days have affected parts of the garden, but luckily a lot of it is sheltered.
There is still plenty of colour in the garden and we are getting lots of comments on how bright it looks. The raised bed was looking very red a week ago, with the coleus and ivy leaved geraniums taking over. But now these are dying off and we have started to plant some winter pansies. So hopefully this will give us colour for the next few months. And some of the plants on top of Bugingham Palace have just started to flower, which is a lovely surprise.
There are a lot of spiders in the garden now. I keep finding them making webs between our plants. Not sure where they’ve all come from, Bugingham Palace perhaps? And some are really beautiful if you look up close, they have some wonderful markings. It’s funny as indoor spiders scare me. But I love watching them outdoors.
Our herbs are looking a bit sad now. Many have been cut back after flowering and others are dying off as they won’t last through to next year. So there’s a few winter pansies there too.
I’ve been repotting some of our mints. And while doing it have cut off some of the white roots and planted them into small pots. These will go on my window ledge at home so I have mint throughout the winter.
As you know we try to reuse unwanted items such as containers in the garden. Well, recently we rescued a dilapidated cupboard from a skip. It’s been stored in the yard for a few weeks. And now our wonderful volunteer Chris has turned it into a cold frame for us to put our more delicate plants in over the winter. Hopefully this will mean we will be able to safely keep some of our geraniums and fuchsias for next year. And it will be handy for when we plant our early seeds too. We are on the lookout for more convertible cupboards though as it would be useful to have extra cold frames.
I’m back to feeding the birds in the garden this week. They will need our feeders in the coming months as other food gets less scarce for them. It’s best to get them used to our having food for them now, so they know where to come in the winter. I hope we will be seeing some of our old friends again, particularly our blackbirds and robin. Some of our sunflowers are past their best, but their heads make great seeds for the birds.
The Blooming Old Gardener