October 2023 turned out to be an interesting month, with just a few bright sunny mornings and days, a few dry cloudy days, and in between a lot of very grey, gloomy, and often windy and wet weather.

But then we are into autumn. However, an overriding impression is that once again, like September, it’s much warmer than usual, particularly overnight because of the overcast skies.

The combination of lack of cold nights, and not much sunshine has meant that autumn leaf colour by the middle of the month has been very limited. Our usual early stalwarts of an Acer ‘Aconitifolium’ in the copse, and a Sorbus ‘Olympic Flame’ in front of the house have been gorgeous, and both have retained leaves well into the middle of the month.

All the recent wet and gloomy weather seems to have suited all our Saxifrage fortunei, and I must get round to planting out many of our seedling forms, which are now flowering in small pots. Now is quite a good time of the year to assess just where they can be slotted into woodland areas for maximum potential benefit.

All the warm weather also meant many late insect sightings – dragonflies in the meadows, and a Hummingbird hawk moth in the terrace garden on 2 occasions up to the 16th.

A fabulous warm sunny 2 days spell early in the month allowed me to harvest a couple of supers from our 2 insulated PV honey bee hives, and witnessed fantastic spider-generated gossamer threads in the lower meadow and a sudden late influx of butterflies in the garden, on October 8th when temperatures hit 20 degrees C in the late afternoon.

We also managed to complete some late-season, external painting which the weather had prevented earlier in the summer/autumn.

The unusual weather this year has contributed to our most disease-free ever apple crop, and other fruiting trees like hawthorn and apples also seem to be having a bumper year, as do our oak trees with a mast drop of acorns beginning early in the month.

However, waxcap mushroom numbers in our meadows seem much lower than usual this year but still appear along with the rare Earthtongues on the croquet lawn from early October.

We were very fortunate to escape the worst of Storm Babet, which caused record rainfall in many part of the UK from 18th to 21st, approaching as it did from the South East. However the end of the month continued with very few dry days and a steadily increasing rainfall with mainly very poor light.

In spite of this, the prolonged warm temperatures and lack of frosts has meant wonderful colour has developed late in many trees which have never coloured up with us before.

In addition, we’ve enjoyed several wonderful rainbows in late afternoon.

The Saxifrage fortunei have excelled this year, and I’ve been able to plant yet more seedlings out in shadier part of the garden to enhance the display in future years.

Our first snowdrop emerged very early at the base of our Sorbus sargentiana, and was probably “out” around October 20th – I missed it until the flower was properly hanging down and open, on October 25th.

Prunus and Malus fruit in the Malus/Sorbus copse were also stunning, later in the month.

Some of the heaviest rainfall came just after the full moon, when I’d seen a forearm length sewin (probably) by torch light just as the rugby world cup was due to kick off. If it had actually spawned I wonder how many of its eggs survived the stream coming up and over topping the banks – the first time this has happened in a while. The pictures below show the location the following morning with possible freshly exposed gravel and stones, and then the subsequent damage a day later.

The month finished with more very wet weather to give a final monthly rainfall total of 301.7 mm which is a record for us here since I’ve measured such things. The PV inverter reading of 185.7 KWH was also one of our worst for the month.