october garden

now we are half-way through October and the first frosts are threatening, the garden is still full of colour though a little bedraggled.

sunflowers and echinaceas have great heads remaining – I must pick the echinaceas for dried flowers. the birds love the sunflowers of course.

the cosmos have just kept on flowering – they are in a shallow pot, and they really seem to like it. Em ( see little dog in background) dug it out for the chicken poo pellets in the spring – I can’t remember if it was the comos seeds he dug up, or if I re-seeded it with them. they also seem to be slug and snail proof.

a fantastic show of dog-rose hips this year. all the roses flowered well and this wild rose has got enormous, blocking a lot of light from the flower garden. it will have to have a big prune this winter.

the guelder rose just glows with colour. this one was actually chopped down by someone with a strimmer a few years ago, but obstinately refused to be disappeared …

I really thought I wouldn’t get a crop of apples at all this year, there was late frost and the blossom all seemed to be soaking wet all spring; I saw no bees on it at all, and then the emerging apples seemed to be strangely pockmarked and distorted – but this Saturn is weighed down almost as much as ever with huge juicy crisp apples. they keep until March, stored in the shed away from the mice.

some dark red, some stripey ….

I’ve really been enjoying the marigolds … slow to start (I was very late setting seed), but they just keep going …

several different varieties. and by starting them in pots I was able to keep them away from marauding rabbits and gastropods.

this lot of wildflowers, though leaning all over the bean patch, have been good value too; cornflower, and corn marigold still going strong.