Autumn - Not Death and Decay but New Life and Excitment!
I continue to be a fan of the changing seasons rather than one month in particular. The shift between months is subtle; a chill on the breeze, a smell in the air or the appearance of dew on fresh grass. Autumn may have been checked off the calendar over a week ago but it wasn’t until today that it finally showed itself. Yesterday the heat of summer clashed with the clouds of fall, making a horrible sticky and humid few hours in which sweat ran down my back and made even the lightest of farm tasks uncomfortable. Today? The breeze was cold to the skin, wearing a vest was refreshing and the air almost warranted knitwear. For me; the perfect day for weeding, livestock, creating new chicken tractors and mucking out work.
2024’s veggie boxes now avaialble
In Suffolk, UK, we’re lucky in that the first frost doesn’t normally appear until the first week of November. For the garden, especially the flower farm, that’s great news. The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) veggie box scheme is almost over for this year. Just two weeks left, with 2024’s shares now available. But the flowers continue, with frothy cosmos, structural snapdragons and the perfect drying flowers - statis and amaranthe - still going strong. Of course, with the lessening hours of daylight stems are not growing as fast but they’re still trying and that means I can still sell.
On the farm gate, it’s £5 bunches of flowers that seem to do best. I can take the time and effort to create a beautiful £10 bouquet but it just doesn’t sell. And then those flowers sit, fade and ultimately end up on the compost. So instead I’ve been picking bunches of the same flowers and popping them on the stall. These seem to go down well as I explain in the video below. The price point is lower, but so too is the time they take to create.
A summer bouquet
A bunch of anemones
Autumn is such an exciting season. The current year is still live; there’s veg and flowers to be grown and sold, lambs and chicks to grow on, compost to make and bees to feed. But it’s also about the future. It’s planning and planting. Creating plans for a better 2024 season. Taking what you’ve learned from the current year and applying it in the next. Changing things, trying new applications and building on previous projects. And for me it’s baby season too; autumn is the time to start making lambs and, in just a month or so, I’ll be welcoming piglets from Margaret and Hyacinth for the second time this year.
Exciting times lay ahead!