I’ll begin October’s garden views with a garden walk of images taken in the wonderful weather of the first of the month, before things deteriorated with rain and winds from named storm Alex.

There followed nearly two weeks of generally grey and damp conditions, before a high pressure system once again brought calmer and brighter weather.

The bright conditions in September, and lack of strong winds until mid month, means the early part of the month has seen lovely autumn leaf colours developing, beginning as always with an unknown birch, Zelkova, Cornus sibirica and Sorbus Olympic Flame.

Throughout this time the garden avoided frosts, which meant that many stalwart late flowering plants continued to perform without being cut down, and with 4 honey bee colonies close enough to the house to monitor several times throughout the day, and variably active, I developed a much better idea of how early in the day they started foraging, and which flowers they visited under different conditions.

A light bulb moment for me was discovering that within the garden, their favourite flowers for much of this time, have origins in the Himalayas, or other mountainous areas of SE Asia. Coincidentally the mountains of the Himalayas are home to the largest species of honey bee in the world, Apies laboriosa, which builds a huge single slab of comb hanging from an overhanging rock face.

My theory is that many of these Himalayan flowering plants, both early in the season, or late into the autumn are capable of producing either more, or higher quality, nectar under cooler damper conditions, than many other plants, like Asters, which the honeybees here rarely visit other than around midday, or in warmer sunshine.

So the Geranium procurrens on the bank behind the house… Persicaria amplexicaulis… and Persicaria vaccinifolia are all significantly the most favoured flowers…… even in damp conditions, though for much of the early part of the month most of the bees are flying down the valley to reach Himalayan Balsam flowers growing beside the stream in the village and beyond. This plant’s flowering season is always given away since the bees return with their dorsal thorax covered in pale pollen.

But its harvest seemed to finish around October 18th when a 2.5 degree C minimum night up here, which was probably actually frosty in the valley bottom, saw the flowers  finally killed off.

An awareness of how our tough honeybees will continue to forage even in very cool, windy or damp conditions and on fading plants which still have a few flowers, has meant a rethink with later cutting back of stands of flowers, in a juggling game which must still be completed before the first snowdrop bulb shoots begin to emerge in early to mid November.

A good apple harvest was completed mid month, and most of the year’s bulb planting completed save the tulips which always go in last to try to mitigate fungal disease problems in our wet climate.

The typically variable month finished on a very damp and increasingly windy note with the last 4 days seeing nearly continuous rainfall, and the final day strong gale force winds. So in the end no significant glorious cool sunshine to set the autumn colours alight, but it always surprises me just how vibrant the reds, oranges and golds of autumn look under dull grey skies and drizzle – a real pull to encourage one outside and enjoy a wander, whatever the weather, in a late October even more clouded with a second national lockdown throughout Wales because of Covid 19.

But even in the wet, you still need to keep yourself properly washed and clean…

The rainfall for the month of 274.5 mm seems to be the most I’ve ever recorded in an October whilst writing this blog, and the PV output, shown below, of 166.58 KWH illustrates that we’ve had quite a few gloomy grey days. The Met Office confirm that it’s been one of the wettest and gloomiest Octobers across the UK as a whole since 1862.