So Here we are in October

It seems to take us months to begin to settle back into a rhythm once school starts. I don’t know if that’s because it’s only our second year as parents to a primary school child, if it’s hard for everyone every year, or if it’s a hangover of March 2020 through March 2021 when child care was closed for months, open for months, then back to closed again.

Anyway, here we are in October and we’re slowly getting into a rhythm with the after school activities fully running and far more homework than last year. We’re also now we’re staring down the school holidays this month, the arrival of the dark season, preparation for Halloween and other celebrations, alongside some home improvements and Honey’s part time evening studies.

Once I acknowledge that summer is truly over, I’ll share some of the activities, garden work, and travel we did over the season. I hung this autumn wreath last week to help myself shift into autumn mode.

I’m currently working on an area in the garden that is only a few feet wide between our patio area and the boundary of our property. We’ve come to the realisation that we do need to go for a fence after all. Our initial thought was to skip expensive and potentially chemically-laden fencing in favour of hedging which would not only improve the habitat in the area but be far more resilient to the wind. I have worked to plant a lot of this hedging on our western side over the past year. Over the summer, when I worked outside while Sunshine played freely during the school holidays, we saw just how much our beloved old man Samuel enjoyed being outside once more. He’s gotten to the stage where as long as we watch to make sure he doesn’t leave our boundaries, he can happily sit, lay, or hunt in the yard for hours. To allow him more freedom in this, we are planning on installing agricultural style fencing with metal mesh to keep it’s visual impact visual while still acting as a cat-retention fence.

The first step to this process is to shift about 15 square metres of gravel and transplant a camellia from the very north-west corner of the property to the front south-facing yard to act as some wind and heat protection against the house. I hard pruned it and left the cuttings in a pile on the patio for a week. When I returned from a multi-night work trip and saw that they were still green, I decided to make a wreath out of them, for however long they last. Happy Autumn.