I hope your gardens all withstood The Storm, although I'm sure that, for some of you, some beloved tree or shrub was damaged and maybe some fencing too.
Nothing came down in my garden, although it did strip my Crab Apple of all its fruit where I was hoping to have Redwings and Fieldfares later this winter.
But what The Storm did do of course was send leaves flying about everywhere. And that means one thing. No, two things. Make that three.
1) The lawns must be raked before the leaves sit in hollows and suffocate the grass of light, leaving me with bare patches
2) Compost bin space must be cleared to accommodate the next batch of leaf-mulch-in-the-making. Given that my leaf-load is largely Sycamore leaves, which aren't great decomposers, I always have to mow the leaves to break them up first.
3) But thirdly, it means a pondful of leaves that need picking off the surface.
To all my pond snails, I send a heartfelt apology because I know they love nothing more than grazing the surface of the fallen leaves.
But down I go, on my knees, plucking each and every leaf I can from the pond and removing the aggrieved pond snails.
Ta dah!
A few leaves will have made a dash for it to the bottom of the pond, but my Hornwort pondweed acts as a wonderful trap for most.
And my efforts mean I won't have a sludgy pond bottom or smelly pond water and, hopefully, I'll have no algal blooms next spring.
The only problem? It returns to looking like picture number one almost every day!
If you want to drop by my RSPB wildlife gardening blog, it is updated every Friday, and I'd love to see you there - www.rspb.org.uk/community/blogs/hfw
Great idea for the crab apples, Wildlife Friendly. If only I'd been quicker - they're gone already (my money is on foxes!)
Oh, Cirrus, if only my sycamore leaves blew across my lawn. Instead, they sit they all wet, smeared to the grass!
What a super Blog !! I enjoyed it . Although, have to say, I usually wait for another wind to blow all my leaves off the grass (lawn is too grand a word for what I have)and rejoice in one job less.
You could dry your crab apples and store them until the colder weather arrives. I store some of my apples and tuck the rest under the hedge so they are out of my way but still available to the wildlife. You will be surprised at how quickly the disappear.
Build it and they will come.