Colourful Autumn
Gardens are never the same from one day to the next but it is this season, September to November, along with spring, when change in the garden is most noticeable.
At the beginning of September the weather still holds the memory of a fading summer. In fact, September is often better than August - but the garden is already beginning to look autumnal. It is bursting with ripeness and still overflowing. We harvest the last tomatoes, courgettes and beans of the season and the pears. The ornamental grasses are flowering and moving with the slightest breeze. We stop the deadheading around this time.
Foggy October mornings have a beautiful and soft light, which gives an ethereal pastel quality to nature's colours. It is the time when we really notice a drop in temperatures and look forward to swapping our summer linens and cottons for the winter woollens. In a good year we enjoy a small nut harvest. Since a squirrel moved in and thought that it was lovely in the garden, the expectations of a nut harvest have dimished, though. I am sure that her/his needs are greater than ours, although I wish I could persuade them to share.
By November we see the last, and sometimes best, autumn colours and the last leaves are falling. Now is a good time for autumn weeding beds and borders, followed by an annual mulch, especially of the vegetable garden, with homemade compost.
It is really important for any wildlife friendly garden - in fact, any garden - that it is not tidied too much, especially at this time of the year. We do not cut down seedheads and stems, we do not prune ornamental plants with fruit (berries) at this time of the year and we do not sweep up leaves nor take away fallen fruit.
Seedheads, stems and fallen leaves provide shelter, fruit on ornamental plants and fallen fruit food. All of it will provide visual interest over the winter months.