Autumn in a nutshell

This autumn has been a bit special as the weather has been fantastic till few days ago (brittsommar, to be specific). I have then taken the occasion to work a little bit extra outside, apart that there is the usual extra pile of stuff to do, also because it has been very beautiful to be out.

A bit earlier than usual this year (just before the end of August), I started the apple harvest. As usual it is a mess. The apples are ready in different times on the trees, I don't manage to store them, most rotten and few get saved in some emergency apple mousse, apple pie, kids eating them randomly....
The worse occurs for the ones that are picked up during the early September.
The later types have better chances to survive, but possibly because of the warmer weather, they have fallen in huge quantity and most of them have got damanged and have had problems to not rotten while waiting to be delivered to Sövde Musteri.

One of the first batches of apples

We have now brought there about 560kgs of apples, but we still have more. The amount that has been thrown is probably the same. It would be great to have the possibility to do one own must here, so possibly we would save the time of driving (though, we would have to spend an ocean of time making the must, handling the rests and fixing bottles?!)

I managed also to made some small progresses on the poolhouse frames.

Sadly, still a long way to go and I am not sure I am willing to paint in the cold as I have done some other year. 

I have just painted the frame

It took some time extra as the frames were already a bit damaged and I tried to made a decent ground work, for once.

Let's see if I have done a decent job next year...

One layer more to go for having this finished

This spring, with the help of the kids, I planted some tuber that would bloom in the late summer/early autumn. Around the pool there is plenty of potential, but unfortunately, planting those and few other plants, didn't help out as ground elder took over and with it, a lot of other annoying weeds.

I have started to clean up a bit the area and by going to different plants nursery (thanks also to a nice goodbye present from work) I managed to fill in the stock and fix some parts of that flowerbed.

The plants I bought with the present

I definitely didn't manage to finish the cleaning off (and all the stones are completely covered by weeds as well) and when doing that I couldn't even find all the flowers I had planted!? 

A beautiful old style Dahlia with amazing autumn light

Another Dahlia variation

The bee and the gladiolus

The ones that came out properly bloomed amazingly and I really enjoyed being surprised by their colors and shape. 

Sadly, now, a few days of real cold just arrived and in order to save everything up I had to take in all the tubers. With the cold also the legal time came and that means that I had really few hours of light to work on this.

Working in the dark

At the end, I ended up working with the torch of the mobile phone, trying to see what I was digging out....