Off we go again

After the sunshine and blue skies of Sunday, it's been a real mixed bag of weather this week - drizzly and dreary off and on.  The rain has been very welcome for the garden and again it's topped the water butts up a little, but we are certainly noticing the shortening of the days.  And dare I say it's getting a tad cooler of an evening, too?  We're not quite halfway through August, a month I always associated with the height of summer (school holidays, I guess), but this year I am very aware that it's more of a run in to autumn.  Strange I'd not really considered this before.

Enough of the pondering, we're still very much on the go.  Quite literally, as we are off 'up north' for a family do at the end of the week.  We seem to have had one of those phases where one or other, or both of us has been popping on and off the Island, and whilst it's been lovely to see people and do new things, we've got to a point where we are looking forward to a bit of time in one place - home!    There is so much to do here (I keep saying it but it is true), in particular some outside home maintenance that we wanted to tackle while we still had good weather, and here we are teetering on the brink of autumn and some of those jobs haven't even been started.  Time to roll my sleeves up, I think.

The garden continues to provide us with almost all our food for dinner; we do enjoy a good salad.  There's been some tomato sauce made, using what's being cropped right now, and I think I shall have to attempt some 'bread and butter pickles' to deal with the surfeit of cucumbers.  It's been a good year for them!