Positively Autumnal

Let’s just take a moment to soak in the Autumn glory, shall we? The brilliantly coloured trees around our garden, the blooming dahlias I’d almost forgotten existed, the budding chrysanthemums and camellias about to burst, the light! Oh the Autumn light…

This time of year the garden just sings, a final farewell song before its Winter hibernation. Shorter days, gorgeous warm sun and crisp evenings. My favourite.

The change of seasons means a turn over in the veggie patch too – our tomatoes were planted very late this year, so were slow coming, and then we ended up with a lot of green ones still to ripen but not the warmth to redden up. Ho hum. The cherry tomatoes have gone gangbusters though, Eleanor has basically lived on sweet delicious explosions in her little mouth all Summer and Autumn long. It’s almost time to pull them out though, most are splitting and spoiling faster than we can get to them. I’ve made much tomato sauce/relish/chutney with them all too – so sweet! I’ve got my Winter veggie seedlings in, Chinese cabbages, broccoli, beets and carrots this year. And always with the spinach and silverbeet – a never ending supply!

The long weekend enabled us to cram so very much in – a trip up to our bestie’s in north west Victoria to meet their new baby boy (no mean feat as it’s four hours in the car on a Friday night after work usually, but you know – new baby!) Then visiting Grandi’s new city apartment in Melbs, a friend’s 30th on Sunday night and then somehow still having a whole other day to finish off the new sewing room/home office and do some much needed gardening! Phew. That extra day really helps, more long weekends please.

For literally years we’ve debated what to plant along our driveway. Since re-fencing the yard in 2010 the driveway is now inside the yard, it used to be in the paddock, but this created a funny strip of lawn which was steep, a pain to mow and just a no-mans land. We didn’t want to plant a line of trees as it would block our view out the front of the house, I was long pushing for an evergreen hedge about fence height (camellia, privet, Mexican orange blossom?) But in the end Matt won out with his assorted natives, also about fence height or a bit higher, to hopefully be quite low maintenance and bird attracting. I’m not a huge native gardener, but do love the odd protea or banksia, it’s been stipulated I get to choose all the plants and not just Matt get a random bunch of tube stock from old mate somewhere off the back of a truck (as I knew would be the case!)

We’d long ago sprayed the grass along the drive in readiness to mulch and plant out, but then of course got busy with the renovations (and baby growing). Then we were lucky enough to score a load of mulch from some local tree removal blokes, so on Monday the time had come to actually do something about our driveway plans…

Ah, that’s better! So happy with how it’s shaping up. And yes we did spread newspaper under the mulch, hoping to prevent weeds and grass coming back up (and had a handy little helper passing us newspaper!) We didn’t quite make it the whole length of the area we plan to plant out, so will need to get more mulch, but it’s a start. Now we can get our natives in the ground while the soil is still warm but moist, and hopefully they’ll just be happy little Vegemites through Winter and get cracking along come Spring.

In the meantime, this week I’m soaking up this gorgeous light and soft warmth before the chill sets in. I have a feeling this is really our last crack at sunshine. But it’s positively Autumnal out there, with positively beautiful dusk golden hours to match…