I’m a known hater of ironing, I iron as little as possible and only do the bare minimum (which includes pillowcases and tea towels – yes I know it’s weird, I blame my mother!).
This is relatively easy to do in winter because honestly I don’t have much that needs ironing but in summer I wear a lot of linen and so need to do more ironing. I’ve tried to make it fun, I’ve tried to make it smell better but none of it sticks. I don’t much like ironing and avoid it when I can but sometimes you have to get it done.
You may have noticed that I had goal in September of getting ironing done and not leaving it hanging around for weeks, so I have returned to using ironing water, smells nice.
In fact, I make it for family lunches all the time because in my experience if you find something that your family will eat, you just keep doing it. My brother still can’t say pavlova (pavilova) but everyone eats it.
Put you mixture out on your baking tray, in a circle and in the oven for about 50 minutes
You can just turn your oven off at this point and leave it there until it’s cool (don’t do what I did once and turn the oven up not off – I was not joking about it being something I couldn’t do!) or take it out to allow it to cool. Don’t worry about the cracks, your going to cover it with cream and fruit, no one will notice!
We did a bit of weeding and we thought about what we need to do in the next couple of weeks.
We really need to buy some compost, manure and some garlic.
That done, we need to top up the beds that are going to be growing through winter (so the garlic and broad bean beds) and the beds that we are going to cover. I want to manure the rhubarb and the beds that took a real hammering this summer, so the squash beds and boxes. They are also the beds that aren’t very full at the moment so they also need some extra bulk, so the manure and compost should help with that.
All the other beds going to sleep for winter will get chicken pellets and compost and will be covered. Of our 16 beds we’ll have 7/8 growing over winter, which is pretty good.
I need to paint the shed and we need to set up decorations for Halloween, we have an enormous spider, solar lights on the edge of the plot, a grave – with bones and a skull that we’re going to put on top of something to make a ghost. We’ve really thought about this!
All the longer term stuff still needs to be done and at the end of this month the clocks will go back making it so much harder to do it all in the daylight, not that there is much daylight it’s under 12 hours and only going to get darker. Ridiculously, for mid October, there are lots of flowers. We have verbena bonariesis, marigolds, dianthus, Californian poppies, the rosemary is flowering, and the aramanth and nasturtiums are holding on.
It’s all good, I may not get everything done, this year or ever but the plot is productive, even in autumn so I’m going to be happy with that.
Those of you following along on 
Although they are going somewhere, we don’t stop being friends who are like family and there will be other walks but I will miss these ones…
I’m sticking to the getting up at 6am and leaving the house at 7am-ish, bedtime at 10pm and golden hour are a bit harder but it makes a difference when I do it and I’m managing it 4 out of 5 days…
A weekly clean of the kitchen, hall and bathroom (including hoovering and mopping). Ironing, nothing that needs ironing hanging around more than a day. I can’t help but feel that the house is a mess, it’s not actually that bad, but I need a weekend devoted to it. I’m getting to most of this…
Defrost the freezer/clear out the fridge. Clean the oven. No I did not do these things, again…
Nic Dempsey 