Week 35

Browning meadows

Hello!

Well! After all of the excitement of yesterday I’m a bit bushed. Yesterday’s post was, as many of you know, all about it being the publication day for The Almanac 2025, and I was just bowled over by your wonderful comments. Actually moved to tears! How hugely lucky I am to have found something that I love doing so much, and to have found a community who love it as much as I do. Your reactions made my day, and it was already pretty great. Thank you. I will draw the winner of the signed and personalised Almanac 2025 out of the pink cowboy hat some time in the next few days, so there is still time if you want to enter.

Or of course you can always…

We can’t let all the excitement turn our heads, because now we have business to attend to. This is our weekly community post in which we chart the minutiae of the year, week by week, and so build up a picture of the way the year shifts through the seasons, inch by inch. At the end of the month I put all of our little observations together into one big poem of the month, and it’s just always a thing of beauty. It is, of course, coming up very soon, so this is your last chance to get your August observations in.

Here’s mine:

Browning meadows

There are lovely mini meadows surrounding the woods where I regularly walk, and I noticed this week that they are now all seed heads, all brown and crisp structure, where before was soft and billowing flower. The crickets were chirruping, or stridulating in fact, but I think even this was quieter than it was earlier in the month. Perhaps they have done what they needed to do now. It would be lovely if these were left to stand into winter, and we got snow and hoar frost on them, but these meadows are well managed for nature and I suspect it is about time for them to come down, but I will of course keep an eye out for excellent frosted winter plant skeletons when the time comes.

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That is it for me for now. Next week we will be into September, with a whirlwind of seasonal changes awaiting us. I hope you are able to enjoy the last few breaths of August.

Having said that…Sunday will be our first Sunday of the month! So please get your ‘usual spot’ pictures ready for sharing in our chat on Sunday morning. You can access the chat via the link below, if you haven’t found us already. It’s a lovely place where we gather weekly and everyone can get an extra peek into each other’s seasonal changes.

But for now, please leave your comments below. What have you eaten/noticed/bought/ picked/sniffed etc etc…this week that felt particularly ‘this week in the year’?