Autumn Harvest and adventures.

September continues to be a warm month, the grass is still growing faster than the rabbits can graze it and seeds are still germinating. One of our favourite spring time flowers are wall flowers and we had planted a couple of long rows earlier in the year, they were doing well until they were mistaken as weeds by a helper, any easy mistake to make as we have a lot of wild mustard which has appeared on our land, it's leaves are similar to wallflowers. As the weather has been so good I decided to take a chance and plant more seeds, they have all germinated and are now at the true leaf stage so with a little bit of crop cover I am hopeful that we will have wallflowers to plant out in the spring, they might flower a little later than normal but that doesn't matter.
The tomatoes, cucumbers and courgettes are now abundant. This year I grew a yellow cherry tomato, the flavour is fantastic and it is a heavy cropper, far too many fruits for us to eat so I will bottle most of them to use later on in stir fries and bolognese sauce. The cucumbers are always grown to make Bread and Butter Pickle, this is a combination of cucumber and onions with mustard seed and Turmeric, very simple to make it goes beautifully with cheese and also cold meats.

The sweet-peas continue to flower in abundance, I have even run out of vases for all of them and am now using jugs as vases, I had only planted two dozen seeds of a mixed collection and they have been the best display I have ever had. They will continue until the first frosts. 

The Peacock butterflies have at last put in an appearance, we have had plenty of tortoiseshell butterflies along with other ones but it is only in the last week that the peacocks have made their entrance. There also seems to be more red squirrels around, at one time it was rare to see this lovely little creature but we seem to be seeing more and more of them, maybe it is the time of year, they will now be collecting nuts for their winter larder, rather like ourselves , storing food for the months to come.

With such beautiful weather we decided to have a day out, we had planned on visiting the Cliffs of Moher, however, this was the day that our sat nav decided to play games with us. We ended up somewhere in Connemara, where we were we will probably never know but the scenery was breathtaking, mountains that reached down to the shore of a beautiful lough, small islands and lots of granite outcrops. A place full of history, mystery and mists.
The West of Ireland is truly a beautiful place, one where history can be clearly seen, of times past imprinted on the landscape.