Autumn Activities

Well I have to say that this autumn has not been as well planned out or even embraced as previous years. I am putting it down to our recent move, it’s hard for a place to feel like home immediately and I have realised that a house only becomes a home when memories are made inside it’s four walls. We are in that process of making our house our home so whereas in previous years I have had plenty of head and heart room to just embrace the season, right now much of my head and heart room is taken up with trying to feel at home in our new surrounds.

Exploring our new county helps us on this journey of feeling at home in our new surrounds so on Friday the girls and I hopped into the car and went pumpkin picking. It was good to get our of the house and drive through the beautiful country lanes of Devon.

We got to our local pick-your-own farm in good time, I have to say that I was rather disappointed in the number of pumpkins they had. (obviously there were allot more than pictured below lol )

In my minds eye there was a whole field full of bright orange pumpkins. In reality there was a long strip of pumpkins growing amongst courgettes and other things. Still, we managed to find pumpkins that we were happy with. Great shape and colour and all that 🙂

It took us all of 45 minutes to choose and pick our pumpkins so we decided to stop in at a lovely garden centre on the way home for a Devon cream tea.

We happened to park under and apple tree, it’s branches were heavy with apples. Happily (with permission) we picked a bag of apples to add to our autumn fruits. I guess we will be having apple pies for the freezer to enjoy all through winter after all this year.

Once home the girls were eager to do a bit of pumpkin carving. I know that most people do that sort of thing for Halloween but we don’t celebrate Halloween at all so timing is not that big a deal. They carved out their pumpkins and placed them along the garden path. I have to say that they look lovely lit up at night.

The pumpkin flesh got cooked immediately and frozen. We will make pumpkin pies this week. This is the only time of the year that pumpkins make an appearance in the stores in the UK and we love pumpkins, so lots of preserving will be happening over the coming weeks. Pumpkin soup is one of our favourites 🙂

Yesterday we took a walk along the Erm River which runs from the moors and down through our town after church. It was a bit chilly and I have to say that I felt rather lethargic, but the girls wanted to gather leaves to make leaf garlands for their rooms. Who am I to stand in the way of spontaneous creativity 😉 so off we went. I was glad to be out once we were walking through the woods along the river, it was refreshing and revitalising to be out in nature. I’m glad we went.

Well I hope that your week is off to a great start. I have a few knits that have come off the needles over the past few days but I shall share about that tomorrow 🙂