We have entered October and there is a definite change in the garden. All the lush greens of summer are slowly transforming into browns, russets, buttery yellows, we could go on… It is lovely to walk around and experience the slowing down process of nature. All the leaves are turning and falling as the trees and shrubs prepare for the cold in the coming months.
But if you look closely the buds of next spring are already present. We love this time of year, there is so much to do in the garden, but the very busy harvest season is slowing down and we have some time to just enjoy the stillness and beauty of nature.
Our pumpkin patch that was constructed entirely from a pile of last year’s weeds, turned out to be tremendously successful. We covered it with cardboard, sheep wool and woodchips in the spring and planted the pumpkins. The rotted down weeds gave the plants all that they needed to flourish and we harvested six massive yellow ones from one plant and 15 smaller orange ones from two other plants. We also got countless courgettes from the plot before the plants finally succumbed to the frosts in the last couple of weeks.
We will keep mulching our vegetable beds and stick to our no dig regime as it has proven incredibly beneficial.
One of our kittens appreciated playing on the pumpkins and we could not resist snapping a few shots of him.
The gargoyle look!
Around our main circle things are slowing down and the colours have moved from mainly flowers earlier in the summer, to foliage and leaves. We post pictures of the four main directions on the compass each month taken from this circle as it is a great way to see how the garden changes and develops throughout the years. You can find them all in our elemental circle category.
East
South
West
North
We took some time to weave our large twisted willow arch together earlier in the month. It now marks the entrance to the lower part of the garden by the stream. The twisted willow is very good for this type of structure; the twigs and branches hook around each other and stay in place.
This year has been very productive in the garden. We have dried our apples and also made lots of lacto fermented vegetables. The apple cider turned out delicious and the raspberry mead is still bubbling away. We hope you have had the chance to grow something of your own. Even if you don’t have a garden, much can be done inside or on a windowsill. Before we had our garden, most of our vegetables were sprouts, as we wrote about in this post a few years back.
Now we are looking forward to the time when plants can be moved and divided in their dormant stage so that hopefully our garden will be even better in the future, for us and for all the creatures that share it with us.
thegreenerdream 
What a good idea you had with the twisted willow. It makes a very effective archway and the path to the lower garden looks enticing. Those huge pumpkins should sustain you for a good while! I love fuchsias and wish I could grow them here. Yours look very happy and healthy.
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Yes the fuchsias just love the damp misty climate here. Some of them grow outside all year and some I put in the conservatory over winter. I can imagine they would be very difficult to grow in your climate. We will probably be tired of eating pumpkin later on in the year. 💗
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I second what Jane said above, she’s got it all covered as far as I’m concerned! If I had my own garden I’d have at least one fuchsia, I’ve always loved their flowers!
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Yes the fuchsias are great and we do eat their fruits sometime. There are so many different beautiful varieties. In Sweden I used to grow them as a house plant in a pot. They did not survive the winter outside at all over there.
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Mead and fermented fruit products seems to be something of a fad now. We just can apple juice and apple sauce straight away. Only sauerkraut gets fermented here, and even that gets canned (ending the fermenting process) just because I do not want to leave so much of it out in the crock for so long.
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I’m originally from Sweden so making mead is a fun experiment. I tasted it last night and it is really nice but I’m sure it will improve further when being bottled and aged for a while. I dry most if the apples in slices as they don’t take up a lot of room and keep well. I make my sauerkraut in smaller crocks and put them in the fridge to slow the fermentation down after a while. And then it gets eaten. You have larger quantities I’m sure so the canning sounds good.
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Canning sauerkraut is done only because there is so much of it all at the same time. It really is not the best option. It works well for sauerkraut that gets cooked anyway, such as with a pork roast. However canned sauerkraut is cooked sauerkraut, which is not as sharply flavored or as crisp as raw sauerkraut.
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I also think someof the health benefits on raw sauerkraut is lost in the canning process. But it is still much better than not making the sauerkraut at all. 😊
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Well, that is why we did it. There were just too many cabbages. It would have been wasted if we did not do something with it. This is funny. One of the most productive years for sauerkraut was the result of a truck full of cabbage falling over on Highway 1, and dumping cabbage all around the apartment building I lived in at the time. There was another year when a restaurant next door to a friend’s restaurant accidentally ordered too many cabbages in their grocery order, so simply discarded all the extra cabbages. That batch got the nickname of ‘dumpster kraut’.
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