The (Moor)Field Guide: 9
Early Autumn, Mid March 2024. Step-by-Step Rose Garden Final Flush and Seasonal Propagation. Veg Patch Crop Rotation & Recipes. Green Manures and Biofumigation. Planning for Spring Pest Problems.
Dear Readers
As I write this we have just had our first frost of the autumn. No sooner had the sun scorched the grass white blonde and the hot winds, cracked the earth, has the temperature fallen away and made me eye the log pile again for the first time in almost four months, gauging our stocks for the coming winter. I sit wrapped in a woollen shawl in my office, warmed through from the most delicious morning spent in the sunshine, inspecting the drooping, darkened leaves of soft summer crops having spent their first night in freeze.
Yet despite this, no rain. Six weeks with no real rain, the briefest of showers that doesn’t even begin to penetrate the ground. The dark stormy skies gather and loom, and taunt and then before you can finish the bolt to get the laundry off the line, the blue skies have appeared through the separating clouds, golden light appears and for the first time since the end of winters wet and dark, you have no apprecitation for it’s beauty and only that it means, once more, no water. Our deep lasagne beds and their composting paths, hold back the dry, trapping the spoils of the milder days of a summer that didn’t really show it’s spite until the very end and has stolen the first few weeks of autumn for itself but still the colours turn, those beguiling golds and ambers, soon the vibrating reds and vermillions.
I adore the seasons, I never grew up with them, not these at least, only wet and dry in the tropical corners of this country. I’d like to learn more about the Six Seasons of the Dja Dja Wurrung, the original people of the land Moorfield sits on. I will do that. I want to understand this place from the knowledge that grew out of understanding it best. I wait expectantly to learn the rituals of sowing, and harvesting, we are 300 metres higher than we were in Tassie. The winters are both colder and the summers, hotter but I am relishing the education that building this new garden in this new place is giving me.
A big thank you to Hugo and mum again who have been doing many of the jobs I would normally be doing but am out of action still with my fingers but I am pleased to report they are on the mend.
Pip xo
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