Mowing by Moonlight

I've just managed to finish mowing the lawn before it went completely dark. I have no doubt that it won't be a particularly well finished cut, but I needed to seize the opportunity, as I've not managed to mow it for two weeks, and it needed doing before it gets too wet, and too long.

It will probably be the last regular mow that I do this year. If there's a suitable dry spell, I'll try to cut it during the autumn and winter, but the weekly cuts are almost certain to be over now.

Yesterday evening I strained a batch of blackberry wine from the fermenting bucket into a demi-john (and second bottle!), which I started last week. It'd been sitting in the bucket longer than it should have been, but I think it's fine, especially as it's been quite cool, so it wasn't rocketing along.

The vegetable garden is noticeably slowing: the courgettes are further apart, and the beans and peas are slower. The sweet peas have almost had it, but are just about hanging on, giving us a little late burst of colour. Even so, I doubt they've got more than a week or two in them now. That said, they're the best we've had them, and it's probably no coincidence that it's also the first year we've had them in the ground, not in a big container.

Autumn, then, is nearly with us. The trees have started to colour, the apples are almost ripe, and the summer flowers are fading. And, not least, I've got several hundred spring bulbs waiting to go in the ground: probably during a week of leave in October.