December 14th

Our ‘river’ of leaves

Autumn colours seemed better than ever this year; some shrubs and trees seem to be hanging on to their leaves for longer than usual.  We’ve had many days of torrential rain and the garden is very soggy.  However, in between storms when the sun comes out the garden is bathed in a lovely golden glow.  The large oaks are normally first to drop leaves, this year being no exception.  We’ve spent a couple of days gathering these up.  The leaf blower was put to good use to blow all these leaves into ‘a river’, then with a selection of rakes and grabber rakes they were collected into a tonne sack to drag to the leaf bin.  The best tool for this job though was a plastic snow shovel!  We filled the sack around seven times but no-one believed that we’d moved seven tons of leaves – it certainly felt like it, and there’s still plenty more!

I spent another morning cutting back rose ‘Charles de Mills’.  It’s a lovely rose but it had grown taller than me and was holding up its metal support rather than the other way round.  I cut out some of the older growth to the ground and shortened all the other stems to around 90cm (3ft).  The old metal support was eased out and will be used elsewhere and I now have two new, larger metal supports around the rose.  When it regrows I’ll tie the stems horizontally around the support to encourage more blooms.  I ended up with a huge pile of prunings, all of which have gone onto the bonfire pile but not before I took around half a dozen cuttings that I hope will root.  It will be good to have more of this lovely rose.

My Highlight

Watching flocks of small birds feeding around the garden.