What a beautiful autumn we are having!

We are approaching November and the colours are still coming out. I have put a few pictures of the colours above to brighten up the blog. It is fantastic just to sit amongst the falling leaves and marvel in the spectrum of colour before you.

We have over a hundred trees in the garden at the last count and they produce a lot of leaves to clear up. I have to use a high-powered air blower to make a pile. This is actually fairly therapeutic, in a similar way to hoovering, as you get a big impact from blowing for a relatively small amount of time.

Sadly, the garden is soon covered again with a carpet of colour and therefore further sessions will be necessary until the leaves have all come down.

The cold is creeping up

This week the first series of foggy evenings signalled the onset of winter. Winter means several key things to us:

• The garden slows down and we don’t have to spend some much time cutting the lawn.
• The cats spend most of their time indoors and drive us mad.
• The moisture in the air turns the house and garden into a moss farm. The roof is already pretty covered, but soon the flower beds will suffer the same fate.

This fairly extreme change in environment can have a disastrous on the flowers and shrubs and we have to be careful that we choose hardy plants if we want them to come back. We already have a list of things that we have planted in the past, never to see them again.

The moss is beautiful and will feature heavily in future blogs, but the consequences of having it are pretty undesirable.

Who’s that stranger amongst us?

It is a sad time in our household as one of the cats has been diagnosed with a long-term illness. To look at he was absolutely fine, but as he had lost a bit of weight the vet took a blood sample and he was soon paying a visit to hospital. I tell you this as it will explain some of the points to follow.

Our cats are generally in good health. They are relatively young and spend most of their time larking about in the garden. This keeps them reasonably trim in the summer but means that when they spend more time indoors in the winter they expand their waistline somewhat.

They crave food, and they follow you around until you give it to them. They sit on the desk and computer keyboard to make sure you can’t miss them. They nick your seat if you get up to do anything. They howl at you continuously as if you can understand them.

When the sick cat returned from hospital he was not allowed out at all as he had to heal. At first he understood this, but very soon he had got his mojo back and he was determined to go out. Every time you moved he would race to the nearest door and sit there expectantly.

The other cat was still able to go out, but only if we opened the door for him. He didn’t take this well and decided that the new half-bald cohabitee was to blame. He no longer recognised him as his brother and would walk up to him, smack him with his paw and hiss and spit right in his face. Now that is brotherly love at its best!

He would also go outside and sit facing his brother in the window as if to say “look at me outside, you can’t come here”.

Our sick cat has a good memory and this morning, woke early, crept up to his brother while he was asleep and wacked him in the face. I am sure this is going to end in tears.

What is that bundle on the floor?

On Wednesday morning we had the next instalment of a story I described last week.

I got out of bed, went to get a drink and as I came back to the bedroom which was unlit, I noticed a large bundle in the middle of the floor. “What is that”, I thought to myself?

Switching the light on revealed another adult moorhen, cowering in the middle of the floor with both cats watching it from about 2 feet away.

Our healthy cat had brought it in again, this time to show off to his sick brother. Quickly putting some clothes on, I snatched it up in a towel and made for the back door – locking the cats inside.

I placed the bundle on the floor and it took off at full pelt running and jumping into the pond. It is the luckiest moorhen alive. However, this morning it was once again walking around the garden as if Wednesday never happened. Obviously intelligence was one of the features that was left out of its makeup.

Record breaking pedigree pumpkin

As it is Halloween I thought it worth mentioning that the record for the UK’s heaviest pumpkin grown outdoors was broken this month. The pumpkin weighed in at 95 stone. It was grown from the most expensive pedigree pumpkin seed of all time at £1,250 for one seed.

Having spent a fortune on the garden to enable me to grow my own vegetables I thought we were mad, but this takes obsession to another level.

Have a great weekend and Halloween. An extra hour in bed on Sunday!

Picture Round

The picture theme for this week is different yet again. I took some of my family for a walk by the sea. The pictures will make it eaiser than last week I hope. See if you can decipher where it is or just enjoy the photos. On a good day this is a fantastic stroll.

Enjoy.

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