baskets full

I loaded these photos into my blog exactly a week ago.

I took these photos in the two weeks before that.

According to the calendar now it's autumn but then it was still summer, although with the extreme heat wave we've been having one could beg to differ.

Last week when I loaded the photos of the pumpkins and the sprouting seed and wondered about the birds who make nests in impossibly high places, I was sitting with my Mum at a cafe nearby. She was  handwriting a chapter in her novel and I was loading photos, trying not to talk to her, feeling a bit guilty for sitting down when there's SO MUCH to do right now on the farm, and in the end instead of writing the words that go with the photos, I wrote a looooooooong to-do list instead. No all that creative but sometimes quite necessary.

Monday morning one week later and the photos are older and the stories that go with them more out of date. But still these are the things that are filling our autumn days.

Apple picking, pumpkin gazing, cucumber collecting and fermenting, tomato harvesting and preserving, spinach, cauliflower, zucchini, cabbage, lettuce and carrot weeding and eating, watering, watering and more watering, planting the winter veg, mowing, netting and fencing.

It's a fabulous time of the year. It's the time that makes all the rest of the farming months make sense. It's crates of fruit in the doorway so you have to walk sideways into the house, it's bowls of tomatoes and boxes of cucumbers and baskets of apples, it's pots of bubbling produce on the stove waiting to be poured into jars, it's colourful bottles filling every available bit of bench space there is, it's books lying open all over the table with new recipes to try, it's rings and clips and lids and crocks, it's a washing machine load of aprons, it's a sticky mess on the floor next to the stove, it's a sink FULL of dishes, it's this crazy time when we are living in one season but trying to provide for the next, it's the part of the year that I feel most tired, most alive and the happiest.

Happy new season my friends!

What's it looking like where you are?


I hope yours is bountiful and delicious.


So much love,

Kate x