Well, you wouldn’t know it if you looked at the mercury, but autumn is here. We’ve had some record breaking heat across our hemisphere and it’s thrown some of our planting plans into dissarray, I can tell you! We’re still planting out some new year crops in the hope we might have an extended harvest of summer delights, and holding off on many annuals we’d already be sowing by now because it’s just been far too hot. But despite the weird weather, we’re still making time to mark the changing of the seasons in our house. There are so many ways we can do this, and the benefits of getting us connected to what is happening in our growing spaces while making slow time to connect with the natural world are manyfold.
Here are just a few ideas for saying a warm welcome to autumn…
- Preserve something: nothing says “the cold is coming” quite like a pantry full of produce, pickled, dried, jammed or stewed. Here at Pip Magazine we have lots of tips for using up your end of summer glut here, here and here.
- Collect autumn leaves for your garden: we live in the city, so we’re incentivised to beat the council’s leaf blowers to the bounty of leaves in parks near our place at this time of year, but wherever you live, stockpiling leaves is a great thing to do in autumn. Whether you use them as carbon in hot compost, make leaf mould or save them up for summer mulching, squirreling leaves away will always be a good idea, and there’s no better time to do it than now.Get out your knitting: prepare for long nights by the fire in the colder months by getting your knitting stash in order now. Plan projects, reassess your progress on those that you didn’t finish last year and cull uninspiring projects from your pile. And if you can’t knit, perhaps now is the time to think about learning!
- Plant some bulbs: whether they be edible potato onions or purely ornamental flowers, planting bulbs in autumn is a lovely way to mark the coming of the cold, and look forward to spring. And it is an exercise in appreciating long-term pay off and watching something grow oh-so-slow which can be a nice antidote to the busyness of our era.
