Autumn

Definitely starting to see the effects of Autumn now. The reddened leaves of the little ash by the veranda have nearly all fallen, the back lawn is peppered with the minute sheddings of the wysteria, lawn growth has reduced to a near standstill and it's getting colder. The leaves on all the silver birches have just turned a light yellow colour and my wife's car was iced up yesterday for the first time... the latter being a little early I think. The few rabbits that I do see now are donning their winter coats and therefore appear much larger and there is a lot more scuffling under the veranda as little mammals bed down for the winter... and as a result, one of our dogs is showing a lot more interest. I guess I really have to harvest the turnips and radishes, the latter have grown to the size of large American apples and are probably too tough to eat - but the proof as they say is in the eating.

I'm going to wait until most of the leaves have fallen before I do pruning. I'm going to keep all the trimmings in a pile separate to the compost heap until such time as I can rent/buy a garden shredder.

Bought a cordless cylinder mower a few weeks ago, blades ran backwards originally but with a little help from my Dad, we got it working properly. It was a DC motor so all we had to do was reverse the polarity (i.e. swap the wires over) on the motor. It does a great job. It's amazing what a better finish a cylinder mower produces, however the ground needs to be prepared for it's use though as stones knock out the cutting alignment and any tough clump of grass will prevent the blades from turning. Anyway, I'm done the back lawn, the bit by the greenhouse, the edges to the main lawn, the bit beside the boat and the dyke edge under the trees with is so far and it's worked a dream. Needed a few charges, but this was because I'd left it a while to mow these areas so they needed the extra juice.

Need fuel for the ride-on now so I can do the chicken coop - then hopefully that will be the last mow for a while. I'll probably only do the lawns two or three times between now and spring - but anything may happen as the air temperature seems to be all over the place.

I'll sign off now as I need to go grocery shopping.