Autumn is almost here. If I were in any doubt, given the blood red hips on the Rosa glauca, and the generous crop of ripe crabs on the 'John Downie', I had confirmation this morning when my car was fogged up. I got as far as the farmyard, and had to wait with the screen blower on maximum until it had made some peepholes in the misted windscreen, because with the low September sun in my eyes I couldn't see a thing. An articulated lorry or a fleet of tractors could have been driving up to the farmyard, and I wouldn't have seen them. Luckily the traffic was really light, and I was not late to work.
The autumn stock is arriving. Container grown hedging yew has come in since the last time I was there, while all of the herbaceous peonies have disappeared from sale. We might have sold them all in the last four days, but I presume they have been put away in the tunnel on The Other Side, to prevent them from getting too wet. The manager's opening instructions for the weekend were all to do with watering, how we must not over-water things now that the weather was cooler (shame it wasn't cooler on Thursday).
The manager's list of jobs to do said to sweep and tidy the shrub beds, but also said that my colleague should treat the gravel paths with weedkiller if it wasn't too windy. After he had walked around the edges of all the beds with the sprayer, I thought I did not fancy kneeling in wet weedkiller to tackle the shrubs, and that I would find something else to do until it had dried. I weeded the irises and pulled dead leaves off them, one of those perennial tasks that always seems to need doing again as soon as you've done it.
The turkeys spent the morning hanging around the plant centre. Seeing them side by side, it was quite clear which was the cock and which the hen. She is large, but he is enormous. He held his tail up in the display position some of the time, which made the difference even more obvious, and he has bigger and more elaborate wattles. They were standing outside the back door to the shop when the tea shop girl arrived, and I saw her give them an anxious glance before venturing to approach the door. Later on a small toddling child began to run at them, then realised how big they were, thought better of it, and sat down very abruptly at his father's feet. I do get the impression that not everyone is entirely happy with the turkeys. They are huge, and I can see that if you weren't comfortable around strange animals, two gigantic black birds with bald faces decorated with what look like old men's scrotums could be off-putting. In fact they are as gentle as anything, and toddled away meekly each time I shooed them away from the back door of the shop. They are presumably not daft, and have worked out that there is food in there.
Following the season of mists, the mellow fruitfulness came at lunchtime when I had a home grown apple and three figs from our 'Brown Turkey'.
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