“It feels distinctly autumnal this week. The light has changed and it's cooler; the leaves on the trees have barely started to change, but it feels different.

I love autumn - it's my favourite time of year. I hope we get some good weather, since our barbeque summer didn't quite happen. It's been lovely today (Monday), especially when the breeze dropped. It was the kind of day when you just HAD to be outside, putting things in order.

Dan cut the grass in the garden, the vegetable garden and the orchard - hopefully that will do it this year, since we bring the sheep on to it in the winter. I've been weeding and brushing up - our garden looks almost respectable, for once. I might buy some bedding plants tomorrow and really go for it and fill some pots and tubs for early colour. That's the easy bit - keeping the hens off it is the challenge!

We brought our new coloured Ryeland lambs home today. They are half sisters to our own three and are called Lucy and Luna. They seem to have settled in OK.
Lucy is a triplet, but she's huge, with a great back end. If I ever get round to getting them halter trained, I might show her next year.

I think our two cheeps might be hens. That would be good and unusually lucky for us. I'm pretty sure they are both the same sex and they look too fine to be cockerels. Fingers crossed. They also look like Light Sussex; the cockerel was Light Sussex and the hen either Light Sussex or ex battery, but I suspect the former. They're only six-weeks-old, so will be in their run for a while yet.

We lifted the garlic, onions and shallots today. The garlic was planted late but has done well; the onions are poor - "something" got under the netting and took off all the foliage quite early on; the shallots are pretty good.

We lifted the remains of the broad beans and gave them to the pigs, who loved them. We're not growing them next year - we don't like them much. We've grown French beans this year and we do like them a lot, so we'll grow more next year. We'll need to pick the last of them and freeze them in the next few days before they get too coarse. The peas are finished and need to come out. The runner beans are still in full production! I'd like to get a green manure in, if possible, so I’ve brought to seed box in for a recce.

Two of the apple trees are groaning; in fact one has split its trunk so Dan's having to do some repairs. The Egremont Russet is poorer this year, but Sunset and Dumelow's Seedling have done really well.

The Victoria plums are ripening; I picked some today and plan to make Old Dowerhouse Chutney this week. Dan's dad gave us a tree from his garden, where it was fan trained on a fence; in our orchard, it's a 2-D tree. I think it will need some prudent pruning to make it look ‘normal’.”

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