Come a little bit closer hear what I have to say  . . . . . . . . .

I love the coming of the Autumn, the cooling of the breeze, the fading light, the changing of the colours. It’s a time to reap what you have sown and also a time of great  release and letting go. The land enriched with the falling of every leaf and the small animals busy gathering for their winter stores. I am privileged that I am not dependant of reaping what I have sown to feed me through the winter months but I am still pleased at what I have managed to produce over the growing season.

Here is a small selection of what I have gathered from my wee patch. The plums may I add were given to me from a friend who like many other people who have plum trees had a glut. I have been harvesting Autumn raspberries which are producing well with plump sized fruit daily, enough for the top of my porridge most mornings. The marigolds went crazy and are throwing their seeds out all over the place, I may have a rampage of marigolds on my hand next year. I have managed to collect quite a bundle of seeds which I will be very pleased to hand out in the spring. The spinach is still producing large fleshy green leaves and I have gathered lots of sweet pea seed heads which I am hoping will sprout in the spring as I want to have them growing right around my Lotti patch.  I gathered all the seeds out of the sunflower head as previously I have tried to dry the whole head still with the seeds in it but it has not been successful and it has rotted. The trick here is to know when the seeds are ripe enough to remove from the head.  Speaking of sunflowers…has anyone else noticed the big swaths of farming land around Fife that has fields of sunflowers growing on it ? Who would have thought fields of sunflowers growing in Scotland . . . .

Should get a lovely array of flowers and colours out of this lot next year  . . . . .

Plump Autumn Raspberries, sweet, fat, delicious  and grown in a completely chemical free allotment.

I still have not harvested all my potatoes, I like to just leave them and let the shaws die off themselves before lifting the potatoes. However I did run out of tatties the other night and went for it and dug some up. I think I have unwittingly hybridised a potato with a pear!     Could this become a thing ?

I still have some mangetout, beetroot and nasturtiums to gather but in the meantime here is a picture of a very cute wee harvest mouse.