Catching up

Nearly three weeks is a long time to be away. The garden has changed considerably, with two frosty mornings in my absence. The outside tomato plants which I'd left green and fruiting are now brown and dead and the basil plants are blackened skeletons. Other vegetables are still going strong: there's a fair broccoli crop and the spinach is looking fantastic.

The new chickens are now as big as last year's hatch, but they're not yet laying. The feathers of the older hens look quite faded in comparison to the younger ones:

There has been an excellent crop of shaggy ink-cap mushrooms in the orchard, although I've missed the peak of production. We did manage to gather enough for the three adults to have a pleasant supper of mushrooms-on-toast last night. This year, with the losses to the May frost, we've actually picked more mushrooms from the orchard than we have fruit!

I transferred the wormery from the garage to the basement, to protect the worms from the frost. They'd converted two trays of kitchen waste into crumbly black compost, which I've added to one of the greenhouse beds. Mike and Child#2 put three tractor-loads of wood into the garage, ready for the days of wood-fires.

In England, the trees were still mainly green. Here, the ash trees have lost all their leaves. The only deciduous trees with leaves still attached in our little bit of wood are the oaks. And we only have two of those, so it's looking pretty bare. Considering that the temperature in both countries is similar at this time of year (and that we're further south here, and therefore get more daylight), it's quite a striking difference.