Getting ready for winter

There is something about autumn that brings out the squirrel in me. I am pleased just now every time I go into the woodstore which is in one of our old pigsties to see the logs neatly stacked against the stone wall and the kindling ready split in baskets. Inside I love to see the shelves in filling up with jellies and chutneys to add to the summer's jams. I have been making apple jelly this weekend, one lot flavoured with mint and another with sage. Yesterday's mint was a little cloudy but today's sage is jewel bright and clear. I am on a roll now and could easily carry on every day for a week with more mint jelly, and rosemary jelly too and I wonder what a jelly would be like made with the pineapple sage that smells astonishingly of ripe pineapple when you crush a leaf in your fingers. Work rather gets in the way.


I have also been planting more bulbs. I have just about finished the daffodils today with pots of mixed February Gold and Iris Reticulata Harmony for outside and seven pots, three daffodil and four iris, for the bench in the wooden greenhouse where I hope they will flower early in that chilly gap between Christmas and true spring. It is a time when I am always aware of an almost painful waiting for things to start to grow and I hope the pots will be a flame of blue and yellow to lift my spirits on a cold sunny day when the greenhouse is warm enough to sit in with a cup of tea.

This dahlia, Moonflower, is the only one that has really flourished this year but it is so good that next spring I will do cuttings and see if I can have four or five and some of the deepest burgundy red ones too. I came late to liking dahlias and still feel I am finding my way in learning how to care for them. I went to a garden at Erddig with my parents for an Apple Day a couple of weeks ago and there was a bed of dahlias which made my heart sing, so, must have more.

I have had a weekend where my head has been full of the garden and I have been filling my notebook with this kind of reminder all evening long. Ian has been struggling with a really painful tooth and a potent mix of antibiotics and painkillers to treat it which has made him feel quite rough. I want to bounce around talking about what to do in the side garden when the builders have gone. It is not a big area but it is the nearest bit of garden to the house and scruffy and undeveloped. I want it to be full of flowers and to move the herbs from the kitchen garden so that they are nearer the door. My head is full of what will grow in sun and shade and paths and planting plans but this is perhaps not the time.

Do you remember some pretty hideous compilation CDs in the early nineties called "Now that's what I call Music!"? As I was out this morning with my camera, the hens came belting down from the wooded area behind the house. They were aiming in a giddy rush for a hidden corner where, if you peer through the undergrowth, you can often see them perching in the tree. As they whizzed by I thought "Now that's what I call free range!" The photo catches the sense of their hidden place but doesn't really convey the happy speed with which they were travelling.

I have some work to do in the morning and then the drive to Manchester. I am here by myself tonight. It is very quiet. If I move away from the low hum of the computer there is the flare and crackle of the fire and behind that silence. Occasionally the cat shifts on the rug, almost but not quite soundlessly. It is very dark outside, a starless, cloudy night. Inside it is warm and light and quiet. I love this house when Ian and I are here together or when it is full of people and the children and their friends and partners are sitting round the table or chatting by the fire. But sometimes it is a real pleasure to have it to myself.

One of those just right days.

Saturday was one of those days when everything goes right (and after the previous week or so I felt we deserved one). The light is golden here when the sun shines at the moment and on Saturday morning the sky above the ridge on the other side of the valley was flecked with pink and gold cloud long after the sun rose and the light pouring into the bedroom window as I lay in bed was liquid gold.

A leisurely breakfast, both of us home at last, and a wander round outside to start the day. The builder has been working steadily on our outside utility. An ancient yew tree had been growing into the corner of the building and gradually pushing it over but the stonemason has rebuilt the corner about two hundred years further away from the tree. Unless you take down the tree or demolish the building the contest between the two will happen again but we don't want to do either. Two hundred years will see us out, a phrase my grandma used to use about her winter coat for the last twenty years of her life. I don't think she expected to live to ninety three. There is still a lot to do but, walking around outside, the building sits comfortably alongside the cottage now. The stone work is crisp instead of ramshackle and an asbestos roof has been replaced with reclaimed slate. It will be great.

We went into the village for a paper and a trip to our butcher's. This always needs a good half hour as no one ever rushes in Mr Morgan's. We discuss the weather and the sunrise and he asks after the progress of my Welsh (araf:slow). Talking with Mr Morgan always makes me feel that the world is a better place. If as you age you earn your face, his is the face of a man with a lifetime of kindly courtesy behind him. It saddens me to see how many of his customers are elderly, although some of the younger people in the village do shop there. I have slipped into buying occasional meat in the supermarket, the meat is not as good as his and it is not as good for the village either. The place would be so much poorer without his shop in so many ways. Next week I will take him a big order for my freezer.

We come home via the garden centre and a gentle detour down some tiny back lanes. It amazes me that we have lived here for three years and yet we can still find lanes only a mile or so from home which we have never seen before, a hidden countryside, lush and tree filled, lower than our site on the hill.

The afternoon is spent in the garden, planting numbers of daffodils to supplement the existing Tenby daffodils around the fruit trees. I planted two hundred and fifty last year and this spring they were pretty but unexciting, dribbles not drifts, so I have ordered another five hundred. I wonder how long it will take me to get used to the scale of gardening an acre field and more after so many years in city gardens.

We take out the courgette plants, crisped by the cold nights of this last week. We have been eating compulsory courgettes for months. I like them but I am glad now to move on to leeks and celeriac. The brassicas come up too and are dumped on the compost heap, all my kale and broccoli turned skeletal by the depredations of thousands of cabbage white caterpillars. For weeks I mounted a caterpillar patrol, picking them off morning and evening, but it would need a mounted twenty four hour guard. Next year I shall net them.

And the evening was a meal of Mr Morgan's meat and our own vegetables, a log fire in the woodburner and a bottle of champagne for no reason other than itself. A calm day, a companionable gently busy day, a sunlit day to store up against the winter.

The tell tale signs of losing it!

Do you have signs that you are not on top any more? Daft signs, trivia, nonsense but they get me every time.

I am rushing around like an idiot again and here we go, all sliding away.

I have not filled the bird feeders. This should be something and nothing, after all it is autumn and the birds are hardly likely to go hungry. But every time I stand at the kitchen sink I look out at the feeders. When things are under control this is great. The feeders swarm with great tits and chaffinches. An elegant nuthatch walks delicately upside down to take peanuts. A woodpecker surprises me with the brilliant red of his lower body. Greenfinches and goldfinches hang just feet away. A flock of sparrows swoop in and fill the tree on which the feeders hang, the branches suddenly alive with movement. When I am not on top of the details of life they are just a reproach: silent, empty. I will do it, I think as I fill the kettle or rinse a mug and then the phone rings and emails ping into the inbox and I pack my bag and leap into the car and go away.

The compost bin in the kitchen is full. It doesn't smell yet (be thankful for small mercies) but it is overflowing with peelings and dead flowers and old teabags. All the other bins are full too. The recycling bin is at the stage where nothing else really fits and the ordinary rubbish bin has been squashed down so fiercely I know that when I take the bag out it is quite likely to tear and drop bits on the floor and make me swear.

My indoor plants need watering. I get up from my desk and think I will fetch a jug and again I am sucked into the immediate clamour of the phone and the computer and the builders wanting tea and my visiting parents (actually not at all demanding) passing by the window and my feeling guilty that they are not getting enough of my time. Hours later I go back to my desk and the streptocarpus on the windowsill is still drooping.

Outside the sweetpeas need lifting and damn it, where is my bulb order, all the additional daffodils and tulips that I spent so long choosing and ordering? I need to track it on the computer, it should be here by now, but I am outside and the chickens need feeding and the greenhouse needs watering and by the time I come in again I have forgotten about the missing bulb order.

The bed needs changing.

I need to plan and shop for food for my FIL's 90th birthday celebration.

I haven't rung my sister.

I haven't done my Welsh homework.

The deep red rug in the sitting room which is my pride and joy is covered with builders' debris, not from them, they keep to the kitchen, but simply because muck is trotting in and out.

Does everybody have these days? Maybe I will have a G and T and go to bed.