Monday 25 October 2010

The Moon, Samhain and Looking Back

I missed the full moon this week. I love to see it in full roundness and I look up to it imagining who else is looking up to it at the same time as me.

This is the last week in the Celtic year. It also marks the end of the harvest season. The new year in the Celtic calender begins on November 1st. With this in mind, I looked back to the past year, in particularly the 'harvest' from my garden.

It has been a particularly poor year. I grew many tomato plants from seed but most failed to come to fruition. The apple and plum trees didn't bear any fruit nor did the strawberry plants. My 5 acorn squash plants produced 3 fruits in total.

Plants that did well were my climbing french beans, pear tree and blueberry bushes. I don't know why it was such a bad year. I got the plants off to a good start but I think it was a lack of pollination.

For months I have waited for my Gerbera plants to come into flower. Bizarrely they decided to show their faces at the beginning of the month. Some opened out their petals briefly before curling up and dying but a couple are defying the odds and making a most unseasonal appearance.

I hope next year is a fruitful one for all of us. x

13 comments:

  1. We had an amazing crop of apples this year but very few strawberries. I've got dahlias and roses still flowering now, but the frosts will put an end to that soon. I love the photo of the moon face!
    Love Kathy xxx

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  2. Our strawberries were ok but not great, plenty of apples but most got spots on them and I didn't use many, cabbage and kale did well but runner beans and potatoes poor, all in all 'could do better'
    love
    Lyn
    xxx

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  3. We had quite a severe frost last night and I'm afraid that put paid to quite a lot of plants, I had a bit of a clear out today.
    Your last photo of the gerbera is stunning!
    Vivienne x

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  4. Beautiful Gerbera. I never have much success in growing anything! I can't even grow Sunflowers! I don't have "green fingers"
    Julie xxxxx

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  5. There was a most wonderful moon on Sunday morning! We had lots of gooseberries and blackcurrants this year but the plum tree, which did so well last year, only porduce about 2 dozen plums. Tomatoes and courgettes didn;t do as well either but we have loads of leeks and four pumpkins. Until the frost yesterday we had some roses, japanese anenomes and hardy geraniums still flowering.

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  6. Wow - amazing colours! it has been a strange year for crops - we are still getting offers of apples - we are well appled-up!

    Kath
    x

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  7. This autumn has been a little strange, I have had plants flowering when I thought they were finished. Some of my geraniums look brilliant this year. There was ice on the bins so it has been very cold over night...not that I notice still chucking the covers off and on all night!
    Cx

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  8. Beautiful photos of the flowers Simone!
    I saw and enjoyed that full moon, there is a wonderful energy that draws you in I find, I can moongaze for hours!

    Sending love
    Julia x x x

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  9. Photos are beautiful! You may not have had quantity in your flowers... but you certainly had quality!

    We had a bumper crop of blueberries. I froze about 130 quarts.... and later in the summer someone stole about a third of our blueberries from our outside freezer! I was breathing fire and brimstone for a while... but now I've resigned myself to the fact. Since it was a bumper crop I still have plenty to get through the year!

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  10. Sorry your other crops did not do well, Simone, but these flowers are absolutely beautiful!!

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  11. Oooh eee, very exciting. I don't know all that much about Samhain, but it excites me just the same because any celebration of life and the movement through the seasons is enough of a celebration for me! Such a shame you had a bad year with your fruits... my dad's new apple tree had so many apples on its young branches that he had to prop them up and his plum tree produced so many plums he had to give them away... I wonder if maybe "up north" they just had something different (or maybe it is because he has been preparing his soil for 25 years, growing crops each year and feeding the soil. Because we don't live that far from him and we still had hardly anything grow).

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