Into autumn

Now we are moving into autumn here. Today was quite cold, sunny but with a touch of cold wind that says "autumn is coming". I found this leaf on the concrete and photographed the shadow, as pretty as the leaf itself. Leaf-lace.

And the big thing about autumn, apart from leaves, is bulb-buying. Once again, as every year, I just can't resist investing in the spring blooms. Today I bought crocus, narcissus and ranunculus. I'm going to plant the ranunculus in the vegetable garden, they seem to do better there. The vegetable garden has been a failure this year; iffy weather early in the season meant that plants were quite delayed and grew very poorly. I've taken out some bush beans that were over, and some eggplant plants that have no show of bearing anything this late in the season. Even the zucchini did poorly. I had three plants, and two succumbed to some kind of virus. I'm thinking that I have to get a lot more compost and manure into the soil in my vege plot, I think the soil is not very fertile now and I have been lax about replenishing it.

I have just finished bottling the last of the plums. Tomorrow I'll have a go at pear ginger with the last of the pears. The pears were not very good this year, either; there was a lot of codlin moth in them. I hope the apples will not be the same. Ah, gardening. You win some, you lose some, but you've always got a new season coming up to try again. Hope springs eternal in the gardener's breast, with great visions of the wonderful garden you will have next year!