Our garden: October 2013
Autumn has well and truly arrived. I love this time of year!
I don't have many garden photos to post this week as I am still trying to get rid of the mountain of bloody pebbles. We've taken a few to the tip but it's a slow task because they are really really heavy and we don't want to break the suspension in the car. And if we're going to break it, it's got to be for something good like a boot full of peanut butter or bottles of Malibu (preferably both).
Blackberries
Because we moved right in the middle of blackberry season (what were we thinking!?) I've hardly picked any blackberries this year. We had no freezer for a couple of weeks so I couldn't pick a load and freeze them for the rest of the year like I normally do. However, at the weekend we went on a bike ride and found some hedgerows with the last plump fruits of the season.
They were a bit smaller than those I'd picked early September but I'll be cooking them in crumbles anyway so it doesn't really matter as long as they taste good.
The bird feeder
A bird feeder was one of the things I wanted to buy before Winter. Scott suggested we look for something a bit different and I'm really glad he did because we found the terracotta bird apple feeder on the RSPB website. Quite quirky and much nicer to look at than a traditional wire feeder don't you think?
We also bought an Arched Heavy Duty Bracket to hang the feeder on. I love the simplicity of it but I'm not keen on the brushed gold finish so I'm hoping that will wear off over time.
Garlic
Remember the bag of garlic given to us by our pebble freecycler? Well this is it. His advice was to get the garlic in the ground now as the bulbs will be bigger and better next year. So that's exactly what I did.
The bag contained cloves of purple garlic and elephant garlic. As you can see, the elephant garlic cloves are huge!
I've put two cloves in terracotta pots, three in the ground and I'll probably plant a more in a few weeks time. We eat shed loads of garlic so I'm really looking forward to pulling some up in a few months time. I've never grown it before so fingers crossed everything works out.
Leafroller / leaf roller caterpillars (moth)
In other news I spent an hour and a half the other night making myself feel itchy by reading about caterpillars and larvae. I think we have leaf roller caterpillars on our rose bush. I noticed the leaves were stuck together, almost as if they had been glued: sometimes 2 separate leaves are stuck together, sometimes both sides of one leaf are stuck and rolled up.
When I peeled the leaves apart I found small green caterpillars. I'd never come across this before so I did some research and came across leaf rollers. I found this video of a leaf roller rollin', it's pretty amazing! I'm pretty sure that's what they are. There are loads of them.
Apologies for the lack of eye candy...but that's how my garden is growing this week :) Keep your fingers crossed for my garlic and that I can be ruthless enough to stop our rose bush being decimated by caterpillars!
