Colours, rain and mysterious disappearances
Monday & Tuesday. All I did on these days was pack seeds and go to the post office. It’s a bumper shop opening weekend when I have to go to a number of different post boxes because they get full up, and a number of different post offices for the big parcels because otherwise the queue gets irate. (It is worth picking post offices where you can queue inside; if I keep David in the Mountfields post office busy for more than five minutes, a string of people builds up outside and everyone has to stand in the rain.)
Wednesday 21st October. Packets of mordants and dyes arrive in the post. I have scoured my fabric and, even more excitingly, I have got myself a labeller for all the pots and jars that this new hobby has occasioned. It is unbelievably satisfying and soon my whole studio is covered in labels. A lot of my boxes look the same (Niwaki tools come in beautifully made yellow card boxes with copper staples so they are the most commonly used) and the labelling saves me opening every single one to find out which is snips and which is printer ink.
Thursday 22nd October. I do love a trained fruit and I have a few stepover apples in the kitchen garden. The one along the fence by my studio, Lord Lambourne variety, has been laden with bright red apples. There have been a few teeth marks appearing in them over the last week or so and I suspected birds. However, overnight, every single one of the apples has disappeared. Badgers? It can’t be deer because they would have taken everything else, but I have no idea who would steal an entire apple crop in one raid. The pumpkin patch is still covered in cooking apples from next door’s tree and they haven’t taken those. I don’t know whether to start worrying about my ripening pumpkins…
Friday 23rd October. Not because I am afraid of nocturnal thievery but because some of the squash are ready, I start to harvest and to stack up rows of squash on the shelves. They jostle for space with little bottles with roses in; this third (fourth?) flush of roses always catches me by surprise but Clare Austin and some of the whiter roses close to the house are looking wonderful. In looking for them, I also spot that the winter clematis ‘Freckles’ is out. Sadly, it droops so much that the flowers are hard to see.
Saturday 24th October. It rains all day. Properly rains. It rains in the morning whilst I write. It rains in the afternoon when I make quince liqueur and sourdough. It absolutely pours when we take the dogs out for a walk. We get home and light the fire and watch old River Cottages on youtube. No, I don’t have Netflix.
Sunday 25th October. A lovely day and I spend it catching up on bits. A few salad plants put out in the garden, making samples for the new Toast collections, editing videos about fool-proof sourdough for Gather. Even on a weekend, I can’t seem to fit an evening dog walk in in the daylight hours and we come home by the light of the moon.