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| Rainbow in West Yorkshire - image dated 01 Sept 2017 |
...the UK Meteorological office (external link) kindly informs us that meteorological autumn begins on 1 September. And astronomical autumn begins on 22 September.
We've had an on and off decent summer and the change to autumnal weather has been gradual, commencing with a nip in the air in the morning and sunshine diminishing as clouds take over during the day. Before the rain came about three days ago, a rainbow appeared in the relatively near distance and since then it has rained spasmodically. In a nutshell, it's miserable. I like to keep a kind of record of the weather on my blog - when it freezes, when it's sunny, when it snows, and so on - because I can check back over the several years that I have been posting about my garden and it's often interesting to know what it was doing, for example, this time last year.
Well, it is definitely meteorologically autumn this morning because it is after 8a.m. and it is damp and dark and miserable out there. You may laugh but I have been waiting to pick my James Grieve apples which are supposed to be ripe in September. Each day I gently lift and test each apple to see if they are ready to be picked and each day they are not but this morning, while I was slug hunting in the wet weather (gardeners are allowed to be eccentric and slugs do like to come out to dine in the damp), I found an apple which had detached and rolled onto the border under the hosta Gold Edger (and the apple was covered in tiny slugs. Oh, nice! I won't be eating that then.
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| James Grieve apples |