making the best of dry weather.

The weather is certainly changeable, on the odd dry day we have tried to make the best of it and have a couple of trips out.

Once again we had a few hours on the Sligo coast, this time at Aughris Head,

this lovely bay also has a great thatched pub / restaurant which has a good range of seafood as well as a couple of meat dishes, as usual I went for the seafood, a large dish of mussels followed by Calamari, once again the squid was better than any I had had in Spain. Despite being nearly into October there were plenty of people around, both in the pub and on the beach.

There was the odd shower, but when the sun came out it was hot.

In between dry days Simon has been creating yet another flower bed for me.

Many of the plants that we have are either in the wrong place or have totally taken over where they were, so drastic measures needed to be taken.

A late flowering Aconite need to be moved plus several iris plants, both yellow and the blue ones. Rudbeckia had gone crazy as well as the Astrantia so they were also moved. I had also had a delivery from a local online plant company, Irish plants direct who have clearance sales at this time of year, their prices are always good, but even better at sale time so I can never resist.

I have been very good though with bulbs, the only new ones are dwarf  irises, daffodils and tulips for the rockery, and Turks head lilies.

There is still plenty of colour in the garden,

the roses have all had a second flush,

Michaelmas daisies and the late Aconite give a lovely splash of bright blue. The Autumn raspberries are also giving a good crop but it is a case of getting to them before the wild birds have a feast. We have also had a few more Blueberries, we are finding that they just don't ripen at the same time, so it's hard to get a good picking in one go. 

The Chinese lantern plant has give us a lot of lovely orange lanterns, I will dry them and use them in a dried flower arrangement.

This year seems to have flown by, next week we will get the garlic and onions planted, it seems only a few weeks ago that we were cropping them.

The other trip out was to Florence Court in Co. Fermanagh,

One of the rose  arches.

the old walled gardens have been restored and there are lovely walks through the woodlands.

This is the latest that we have visited , normally our visits would be in the spring or summer time, but there was still plenty to see. The roses are still blooming,

Beautiful shape and the perfume was incredible.

lots of Kaffir lilies

and beautiful pink Japanese anemones,

and this lovely splash of yellow although I'm not too sure what it is.  The veg' gardens were also full of veg, the volunteers have certainly worked very hard to bring these gardens back to their former glory.

They also have plants for sale( who can resist?) and I totally fell for this beauty, a hardy member of the ginger plants it originates from the Himalayas. 

Roscoeo purpureo               

Technology problems.

I have to admit, I am with no doubt a Luddite, I like a simple life, plug it in and it works. In the past three weeks a mobile phone, bought just four months ago decided to play silly beggars, charge it up and it lost charge within twelve hours even if it hadn't been used. So we took it back to Car Phone warehouse who informed us that it would have to be sent away.  OK, but we need a mobile phone, it is very seldom that our land line is used for incoming or outgoing calls. Being rather stupid we said OK, if we have to get a new phone we will have the same as before. Mistake, the new phone is even worse than the older one, charge it all night and the chances are it will still be flat in the morning, sometimes it charges, sometimes it doesn't. So back to Car phone Warehouse, this time we saw the manageress, who said she would have to check it out for herself, so we left it with her, expecting a phone call from her the next day. No phone call so tried to  phone her on the land line only to find that that was also not working, even worse, neither was the internet, hence no blog posts. So back to Car Phone again to be told the phone is fine, I don't think so, she had had it for two days, in that time there were three missed calls and one text message, the phone was telling us that the battery was low, so back in we went to be told that was because there were a lot of calls while she had the phone. So we are stuck with a phone which is unreliable /useless. However Vodafone were very good and got the problem sorted on the land line and internet connection, only for our computer to die. We can't complain, we have had it for nine years, and being Luddites we don't do all the clean ups that we should, mainly because we are always afraid that we will do it wrong. We now have the new computer, and so far no problems with it, however, while we were waiting for it to be delivered we bought a lap top but lap tops have very small screens so we connected it to our previous monitor which is in fact a 28 inch TV screen, great when you have poor eyesight like me, however, as the remote hasn't worked for years we were unable to alter screen size to access the side bar, yet another trip to a specialist shop to get a new large screen. Of course, as the old computer was dead I have been unable to find a good photo editing program, the one I was using was magic, but I cant remember the name of it, so it will probably be a bit hit and miss putting photos up on the blog. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, Autumn is definitely here, the trees and bushes are all showing their Autumn colours and the hedgerows are full of brightly coloured berries.

Guelder rose berries.

The Guelder Roses have berries that look like rubies,

A favorite of mine, Spindle.

the Spindles have their unusual pink berries with beautiful bronze foliage,

and the wild Arums are now spikes of red berries.

Maple trees look magnificent with their Autumn colour.

Shaggy Ink Caps.

The first of the mushrooms have also appeared, Shaggy ink caps, delicious just gently fried in butter.

Rosa rugosa, second flush.

The garden is still very colourful with a second blooming of Rosa rugosa.

We have tried the first of the Kohl rabi, I doubt we will grow it again, we found it rather bland, runner beans are continuing to produce and we have had a reasonable apple crop, most of these will be dehydrated for winter use. The table birds all did well and are now in the freezer, most have had their thighs and legs removed as they were so big, we did keep one complete bird for Christmas,

it weighed in at ten pounds six ounces, we have had smaller turkeys.

The new bird bath.

Inspired by Allen Titmarch's  'Love your garden' program, Simon has made a beautiful bird bath, using a  Gunnera leaf as a mould and white cement, it has taken up all the veins of the leaves, I am chuffed with it, all it cost was quarter of a bag of cement, (two euros) and some sand which we already had.

A small fishing boat in Kinvara harbour.

We have had a couple of nice days out, one to Kinvara, a delightful small fishing town, and also to Belmullet, a place that we had tried several times to visit. We found it a very dull place and not somewhere that we will go again.

However, we did find an interesting piece of coast line. But it was on the list and now it's done.