November began with a couple of gloriously bright days, and the month has provided some fabulous sunrises.Thereafter, as if often the case now, although we had a few frosty mornings, there was some rain most days, and plenty of grey skies. Not many storms by the middle of the month, and fabulous golden and red leaf colours continued to enrich the scene.

Fiona continued with her mammoth task of trying to install Yorkshire board edging to most of our lawned areas, working whenever it was dry, and light enough. We figure that the cost and effort involved will pay dividends with easier edge management, as we get a bit creakier, and we can concentrate our efforts on hand weeding.

William and I continued with the annual cut back, leaf collect, and mulching of the retyred matrix snowdrop collection. This year with many of our early snowdrops beginning to flower about 3 weeks early, it’s a relief to have been able to achieve most of this by the middle of the month. We raddled our identical twin ram lambs, Gwaur and Noddy, in early November and put them in with half our small flock…

In the end the month finished with just a single dry sunny day, although we did enjoy a few frosty mornings, though nothing too severe. On balance quite an average November, though we’re still waiting for a run of a few dry days to allow the ground to become a little less soggy. But it’s always a good month for reminding me that for all the rain we get here, without the wonderful clouds that are constantly spilling in from the West, we wouldn’t get all these wonderful sunrises!

The rainfall for the month at 212.6 mm was quite a high figure, but still way down on November 2015, and as can be seen from PV comparisons, all those lovely sunrises didn’t really lift light levels significantly, which were only just above the last year’s very poor record.By the end of the month Galanthus ‘Mrs. Macnamara’  was more advanced than she’s ever been before – by about 3 weeks. We’ll have a Christmas graced by many snowdrops at this rate.