Ruby&Ruch

It is the end of October, the day the clocks have gone back and our gardening thoughts are pretty much filled with waiting for frost. The garden reaches a kind of autumnal peak at this time of the year

but we know of course that one frost will blacken, sap and kill, and winter will have begun.

In my experience so much of gardening is anticipation of the pleasures to come, and remembrance of the fulfilment that has been, that it takes me a conscious effort to enjoy the here and now, what is looking wonderful, the delight of eating and processing our home grown produce, and the contentment of well grown and propagated plants.

So it is with the frost, we look at weather forecasts on three different apps, compare notes with other gardeners and vignerons and get up early to see if ‘it‘ has happened overnight.

As I write, I am greenhouse-less (although one is to come this month, built out of old oak windows that we got for nothing from a person emptying their garage in anticipation of a move) so yesterday all the tender plants were moved into the house and are currently occupying every available windowsill and table. They will move out again in a couple of days because the weather apps say it will not drop below 8 degrees for the following 10 days and I always think plants are happier outside than in.

I also cut some dahlias for the house so that if it was frosty last night as promised, then at least we would have those for a week. The promised frost did not appear.

This is the time of year when the morning sun is at its most theatrical, backlighting everything so that it looks silvered and luminous. We notice that the sun rises in a new place every morning now. Its first beam hits the garden at around the time we get up, and it comes from an apparently more northerly direction and stays low all day. Since June we’ve lost four hours of light; we’ll lose another four by December.

There is a strange sense of ‘hurry up and wait’ hanging over us. There are still chillis and aubergines in the vegetable garden, and beetroot seedlings waiting to be planted. Winter salad is coming through and celeriac and leeks are in the ground waiting to be pulled. It feels like we cannot be sure at all of how long the chillis will be with us, but on the other hand we are waiting to see if the tiny beetroots will grow. We are gamblers, with fruit and vegetables as our currency.

The birds who inhabit our garden to a far greater degree than us are urgently making the most of whatever easy food is available, fattening up for the winter. They are noisier and more visible than in the heat of summer. A robin (is it more than one?) is constantly in view and hanging around for whatever is dug up, blackbirds sing beautifully at dusk and do their ridiculous panic call for no apparent reason. A lesser spotted woodpecker visits our walnut tree and picks up walnuts and hits them impossibly quickly against the trunk to break them open. The swimming pool is covered and birds bathe in the pools of water collecting in the cover.

It has been a blisteringly hot summer and the last frost was at the end of March (not early May like the year before) and the autumn has been perfect – long and warm with honeyed light and perfect evenings in the dusk. Frost marks the moment that those days are over and the winter, which has its own joys, begins.