Autumn Colour.

Once the leafs start changing colour you know that Autumn has arrived and winter is just around the corner.

I love this time of year and we do get some lovely colour foliage on the trees but nothing like the autumnal colours of New England or Canada, it must be a fantastic sight especially with all the wonderful reds that they get. Our colours are rather more subdued, but beautiful none the less.

We had a walk through woodlands near Portumna earlier in the week, mainly beech, it was lovely and we were surprised how many butterflies there were around still.

As we drove around we spotted a 'Workhouse Centre'. Unfortunately we didn't have time to go into the centre but it is on our list to visit next year. The workhouse buildings look very formidable, definitely a place of last resort. Built in 1852 to house six hundred residents, it finally closed as a workhouse in the early twentieth century.

We also came across a very small village called Abbey where there is indeed a Abbey. This abbey was a Carthusian abbey.

The Carthusians were founded in 1084 by St Bruno and their annals place them in Kilnalahan sometime between the foundation of a priory at Hinton, Somerset, England in 1227 and in Beauvale, Nottinghamshire in 1343.

The Carthusians were an enclosed order, living solitary, austere, contemplative lives and they derived sustenance from the lands.

This was Ireland’s only Carthusian priory and was occupied until 1321 when an order from the General Chapter of the Grande Chartreuse was made to suppress the priory and move its monks to various other houses of the order.

Abbey is a very pretty little village,

and I love the retake of the 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' mantra.

 This week we also popped into our local forest, near Boyle, aptly called Forest Park,

again lots of lovely Autumn colour,

although the leafs are starting to fall we should keep the colours until the gales come, forecasted for later this week.

The upside to gales is seaweed, it's always a good time to go collecting seaweed after a good storm. Every cloud has a silver lining!

A perfect rose and beautifully perfumed.

We still have lots of colour in the garden and flowers to pick for the house but the sweet peas are just about over so they will now be pulled up and composted, it has been the best year we have every had for them even though they had a very slow start, but they have rather swamped the leeks.

Our late crop of mange tout peas have given us our first few peas, I'm hoping these will go on for a few weeks to make up for the lack of cabbages, for some unknown reason to either of us we seemed to have grown only half a dozen cabbages, already we have eaten two, and we both love cabbage. I suspect we had intended to do a second planting but forgot.

The carrots have done very well this year and we have plenty of them, some are huge,

one weighing in at nearly twelve ounces,

 I used that monster to make a carrot cake, one of our favourite cakes.

Ginger nuts.

We are also back to making biscuits, not something that we would normally buy, it's only in the colder months that we seem to like a biscuit with a nice cup of tea. They are so quick and easy to make, trouble is we eat them too fast.
Our young quail have now stared laying,

This large quail egg weighed 22gms

this was a second egg from one of them weighing twice the weight of a normal quail egg. Being short of hens eggs for our customers we have started using quail eggs in cakes, they make a much light cake than when we use hens eggs, I wonder why that should be?