New tenant ...

Woodland fairies in residence ...

Here's a fun idea if you have small children or grandchildren and want to convince them that fairies really do live at the end of the garden. My friend Julie spotted this recently while out walking her dog in local woodland and we both thought it was rather fun. No reason why you shouldn't replicate this in your garden - if you don't have a tree, you could always make something similar using a flower pot. Although you might want to locate it somewhere that your dog won't wee on it - and obviously you should make sure that there is nothing that could harm your pet.

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Pots to spare

Flower pot lady

With autumn here it's time to catch up on all those chores, such as refreshing hanging baskets and containers with new, winter hard plants - and emptying old pots of any spent compost and cleaning them ready for re-use next year. I always seem to end up with more pots than I can use though: last year I gave a lot of empties to Chiltern Open Air Museum, who used them to pot on things for their own use in the gardens there as well as for specimens they sell on their plant stall. There's a limit to the number of pots you can give away, but here's another idea for any surplus ones you may have, which we spotted at the museum!

What do you do with your extra pots? 

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Success!

Another sign of autumn being here - the annual garden show was held last week. All around the village you could hear the sound of busy bakers (the local shop briefly ran out of self raising flour and jam sugar at one point) while the allotment saw an unusually early contingent of gardeners descend on it to harvest fruit and veg entries ...

 I must have been doing something right as I was excited to find that I'd won prizes for my apples, plums, pears and cape gooseberries. It will be nice to be able to eat them at last - they have been kept aside on a sunny windowsill to ripen just in time for the show.

 And of course I now have a prize winning bowl of fruit in the kitchen!

Needless to say, Archie and Angel are not in the slightest bit impressed, and prefer not to get involved, but instead to supervise from a safe distance while soaking up a few rays of autumn sunshine from their beds by the garden window ...

More signs of autumn

Whippet o'clock

Another indication that autumn has arrived: Archie is happy to stay in bed longer in the mornings and no longer wakes me up at 5am with a determined prod from a cold wet nose and doing his greeting-the-sun dance. Time to start setting the alarm in the morning - whippet alarm clocks are very efficient during the summer, but less reliable in the winter!

We also had a very restless night last night before Archie felt safe to settle in his bed for the evening, due to the usual seasonal invasion of the house by spiders moving in from the cold garden outdoors. They seemed to have all targeted the bedroom, and in the end I had to go fetch the long-handled microfibre duster and remove the lot from the ceilings and tops of the walls where they had cosily made themselves at home. Archie sat and apprehensively watched, but once satisfied that the last of them had been banished at last settled in his bed for the night ... He's not keen on moths either. And tomorrow it is the annual village show where everyone competes with their allotment produce. It is an early start, so I must remember to look out the alarm clock!

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