Lots of garden stuff to do

Well, I don't know whether or not the Devil's been at our blackberries on Michaelmas - but the last few days of very wet weather have done for the last fruit on the bush, which is now either mouldy or far too squelchy to use. Fortunately at the weekend we picked up some windfalls from next door's apple tree (which helpfully grows a branch over our garden) to have a very nice crumble indeed.

Next it'll be time to cut back all the bits of the plant that have fruited this year - and to make sure that the loganberry canes that bore fruit are also cut right back. There's a nice simple tutorial on how to do this on videojug.

The big task facing us this autumn (and winter, no doubt) is to get the garden set up for what we want to do with it. The area we'd like for the boys to play in is currently covered with a lot of mature shrubs that just want taking out. Once we've got it cleared, we're going to try to move the turf from the area for the vegetable garden and see if it takes. The ground is terrible - poor quality clay soil with barrowloads of rubble just beneath the surface - so we think we're going to go for raised beds for veg.

We're going to need plenty of compost - and our big compost heap is happily doing very well. More worms than we've ever seen before, and it's producing a nice amount of heat. This, in tandem with a fabby bokashi system from Wiggly Wigglers, is eating up all our compostable waste at the moment. Regular additions of spent grains and hop flowers from the brewing seem to help too!

So phase one - clearance - is well underway. Once we've got the shrubby patch cleared, then we'll have a better idea what we have to do to create the areas for veg & herbs and for a few fruit trees to go with the plum & loganberry already in place.

The garden's full of birds at the moment - it's hard to keep up with having seed in the feeders. Crowds of coal tits, a handful of blue tits and great tits, dunnocks, robins, blackbirds - and even a nuthatch and a chiffchaff - are making a very nice change from the gangs of magpies that usually swagger about the gardens round here.