autumn gathers pace

Suddenly, without my noticing, the countryside has gone from gold to brown.  North Staffordshire and the Peak District were astonishingly green, while north Essex was still a straw coloured patchwork of stubble when we got home.  Now, the fields have mostly been ploughed and harrowed, and are reduced to a neat brown tilth.  Potato harvesters are still trundling up and down here and there, including on the lettuce farm, with a clattering rumble of machinery.  The potato leaves are withered and brown too, and even stretches of the roads are streaked with mud from the tyres of tractors.  Strictly speaking, I believe it is an offence to leave mud on the road, but farm vehicles do.

The trees have barely started to change colour.  So far what look from a distance like flushes of autumn russet turn out on closer inspection to be horse chestnuts hit by leaf miners, and gone brown and shrivelled before their time.  The oaks in the hedgerows sit heavily in the landscape, but are still dark green, and there is not yet a hint of butter yellow in the field maples.

The geese are flying.  They pass overhead as evening approaches, sometimes in great flocks, and other times as tonight in small, low, v-shaped groups, causing the chickens to scatter in panic as they register a large, low flying bird, without stopping to analyse whether it is a goose or a buzzard. We did see four buzzards at the weekend, swooping with slow wing beats over the field behind the house and riding the updraughts.  Four at once suggests a family group, parent birds and their successful fledglings, learning to hunt and forage.

I like the slow descent into autumn, the vivid red splash of rose hips in the hedges, and the gleaming black berries of elder.  It is still warm, seventeen degrees this afternoon according to my car, as I drove back from visiting a friend whose apple tree is literally dripping with fruit.  Vast cooking apples drop from it into the grass.  She has had apple crumble and stewed apple, and made an apple cake for me, and pressed a great carrier bag of apples into my hands as I left, because she has so many.  She has a glut of courgettes too, but that is what happens when you plant out fourteen courgette plants for two people, one of whom doesn't like green vegetables.

The replacement pane of polycarbonate arrived for my greenhouse, to fill the gap where a pane of glass simply slid out.  We must fit it, before the leisurely journey into winter accelerates, and I am threatened with a frost.