Garden at the beginning of November 2012

I started my new job today (it was fantastic!) so I thought I wouldn't be able to take a garden at the beginning of the month photo as I wasn't at home in daylight. But the OH is on leave still and very kindly took some garden photos for me today.

A lot of stuff has died down already. The echinacea flowers are over so I cut them back last weekend, and the rudbeckia won't be long now either. I even remembered to go and get some grease bands at the garden centre to put around the apple tree and its support (no point doing it to the espalier apple tree as any insects could just crawl up the wall and trellis to get to it).

We also have the most perverse garden birds ever seen. Initially they loved the ground feeder and ignored the hanging feeder. Then we discovered that the local pet shop does bird food by weight, so you can buy small quantities to see what the birds like. We discovered that they love sunflower hearts, so much so that they now have a kind of stacking system for the hanging birdfeeder, like planes coming into land at Heathrow! And they're totally ignoring the ground feeder, which currently has robin and tit mix in the hanging feeder and fat balls too. Now the weather has turned a little bit colder (we're down to about 10°C now) the birds are around a lot more.

I have also been doing a lot of work constructing raised beds and filling them with compost, but I'll post pictures of that once I've finished. ;-)