Autumn Garden Jobs

I am no Monty Don, but I do secretly quite like fiddling about in the garden.   Autumn is still interesting garden-wise, there are a few things to plant and lots of things to tidy but mostly it is all a very good excuse to get cold-nosed and rosy-cheeked and then go inside and have steaming cups of tea and piles of hot toasted bready things with butter.

(Why not whip up a quick batch of drop scones?!)

So anyway, I did a bit of gardeny pootling the other day and I urge you to go out and make the most of any non raining moments this weekend to get your hands dirty, green up your fingers and get rosy-cheeked.

My initial goal was in fact purely to clean out the chickens and plant my bulbs, but once I'd done that I was having such a good time I carried on until tea.  Now is prime bulb planting sort of time, but it wont be for much longer so get to it!

Here is one I planted earlier, I managed to lose my trowel in the move so had to take a bit of a bodgy approach involving an edger and flaps of turf and crossed fingers.

You can buy bags of bulbs at fairly reasonable prices from a garden centre or B and Q.  You could plant them at the edges of flower beds (that way you wont disturb the bulbs when you plant other things in the main bit of the bed in the spring), or you could plant them in the lawn sort of scattered about as if they just decided to grow there by themselves, or if you are short of garden or have none at all, then you could plant them in a pot, tub, bucket or any other receptacle you can find.  Follow the instructions for how deep and how far apart to plant them and abandon until Spring.  You can also plant indoor flowering bulbs in pots ready to flower just after Christmas.  These are fab for brightening up the post Christmas drab-ness and make lovely presents. 

Having fought my way in and out of the shed during the first few garden jobs and nearly come a cropper several times, I decided I would tidy that next.  A couple of nails hammered into the beams (I had to put a large sunhat on for this in case spiders came tumbling from the ceiling got on me), all the silly shed-y bits and bobs in boxes on the shelves, a sweep of the floor and voila!

I admired it for a while and congratulated myself on managing my spider horror.

Annoyingly the lawn then looked particularly unkempt compared to the tidy shed so next I embarked on a bit of mowing.

Usually Edward's task, it was quite a lot of hard work (legs bums and tums eat your heart out, butter guilt assuaged, phew), first the actual mowing bit, then raking up all the clippings and then the crushing realisation of the terrible job I had done of it.  The grass equivalent of the haircuts that three year olds give each other when playing at hairdressers...

I wont show you, it's too embarrassing.  The chickens were quite impressed though, lovely loyal girlies.

Then I was completely worn out and went in for tea and toast, just in time too by the looks of it...