Hello! I hope you have had a lovely, autumnal week. Here I went to Yorkshire during Storm Amy (for an Almanac 2026 event with lovely Kemp’s Bookshop & General Store) but luckily bought a very robust umbrella in the first shop I saw and so did not get too soaked. I have noticed that the fancier trees and shrubs, cherries and cerdidiphyllum in particular seem to be turning their autumn colours. I have gathered cooking apples from neighbours’ boxes along the road and thought about making crumble, and I have noticed the full and just-past-full moon on my early morning walks, as it was setting, with a beautiful dawn in the opposite part of the sky.
This is our weekly community post in which we track the seasons week by week, noticing the little things that mark out their changes - what have we baked? What have we spotted in nature? Is it woolly tights season yet? Are you eyeing up the dried fruit and the advent calendars in the supermarket yet? And so on and so on. I tell you mine and then you tell me yours and I bundle them all up into an end of month poem. You can find September’s here.
Here’s mine:
Piles of pumpkins
When I first started studying horticulture I had a placement in a walled garden just outside of Bristol. It was autumn, and one of my first jobs was collecting up all of the pumpkins and winter squashes that had been harvested and moving them into the cold frames to cure. Can you imagine? My memory is that the air was lightly hazy from an end-of season fire, and that the scent of woodsmoke and damp, organic earth filled the air, and that the sun just-about warmed my back through my coat as I hefted these beauties: umber and apricot, whale-grey and forest green, smooth skinned and warty, bulbous and fairy-tale shaped. It was an almost overwhelming sensory experience.
I walked past my local health food shop this week and they had this beautiful display outside, and it sent me right back. I bought a few.
That’s it from me. If you are in Bristol I will be at Harvest Festival BS4 on Saturday (11th) at midday chatting about and signing copies of my latest almanac, and it would be wonderful to see you there.
A reminder in case you need it that every Sunday morning we gather in the ‘chat’ part of the app to share pics from the week just passed, as we can’t do it here. Please join us if you haven’t before.
But now over to you. What have you seen/heard/smelt/eaten this week that felt particularly ‘this week of the year’?
Beautiful sunsets, full moon rising pumpkin orange.
A glorious harvest moon rising through the twilight on a warm October evening, days so unusually mild and windless that they feel almost like May, except with red leaves instead of blossoms…