Mmm, autumn always seems like the start of the gardeners year - new bulbs, lots of pruning, cuttings for overwintering, harvest, ladling on compost and planting the new bare root fruits, roses and shrubs. After a truly bizarre rainless summer, the allotment has turned sere and brown much earlier than usual. Rudbeckias, dahlias and heleniums and asters had an attenuated show - I always struggle with these prairie type beauties on my sandy soil but one must have them. This year, not even emergency hosing was going to prolong the luminous late summer show of golds, bronzes and purples so I turned my face to the gravel garden which never fails to thrive. Melissa, how I love spanish broom - yep, Spartium junceum can be a thug but what a gorgeous fragrant and elegant one. They twist and bend, making fantastically gnarly shapes and grow huge and fat in East Anglia. Cytisus also grows to shocking tree size, as does Tamarix. Desperate savage pruning has been done. even though the shrubs in question are less than 6 years old, they are eating the shed. A glorious stipa gigantea, planted so carefully to filter the low evening sun, has been overshadowed one one side and totally mugged by a giant acanthus on the other. In truth, the entire gravel garden has to be redone, lifting the remnants of the old membrane (which utterly failed to prevent the millions of verbena, centranthus, ox-eye daisies, althea and eryngiums from seeding with total abandon) and replacing plants which should never have been placed there (legion - Dieramas, Schizostylus, echinaceas - embarrassing how clueless I was to plant these moisture lovers in gravel!!!)Then there are the plants which clearly love it but are far too keen - helianthemums, nepetas, salvias, hebes - small cushions are ground swallowing mounds. Apart from lots of lavender - I have hedges of L Hidcote - the deepest blue, I do not have as many silver plants as I would like. A colony of pulsatilla does well with summer silky seedheads. Santolina and a lone artemisia (Powis Castle - another huge thing). Would like to try astelia and also celmisias. A plant grown much by Ingrid, and a revelation to me, was Limonium - violetta, I have and it looks terrific with eryngiums and stipa tenuissima. Stachys or Phlomis have, so far, failed to touch my heart and I have done verbascums to death. Still throwing out flowers is the modest Zauschneria, looking good with the last of the escholzias, Salvia greggii and microphylla are flowering profusely and unstoppable. Also, pushing out another cycle of flowers - a lovelu silver leafed mound of erodium chrysantha (might be good for you, Melissa, it is a lovely thing). However, much of this is happening out of my sight since I am woefully stuck at home in a kitchen which resembles Entebbe. A simple flooring job turned into armageddon - the massively heavy cast-iron and enamel sink is upside down on the sofa, the old washing machine has been drug to the tip and a new (to me) one has arrived - although the sink issue means it is still in the middle of the kitchen. Am running out of knickers and socks - may have to be a slut and turn them inside out since the whole water system is now only usable with a lot of fiddling about with stopcocks. In a moment of frenzy, I thought we may as well go the whole way and ripped off great swathes of old painted wallpaper - which of course, came off really easily....on one wall - the rest seems as though it was cemented in position. The ingrates (offspring) have absented themselves for large amounts of time yet still manage to materialise at sensitive (shouty, sweary) moments and chip in with ludicrous suggestions (we could put speakers in the new sink cupboards, why don't we have an indoor hammock?)Estimates of finishing time have gone from 'around a week' to 'in time for Christmas'. We are eating a lot of 'bread based snacks' - although the rate of jam consumption is worrying as I was definately slack this year, using the virusey raspberries as an excuse to cut down on all the 'earth mother' nonsense I had somehow got myself into(what was I thinking?) May be forced onto chocolate spread - sweetheart can have marmalade (shudder). Even so, it has been a spectacular tomato year (no rain - no blight)- have had kilos and kilos from 40 plants. I now have wrists of iron from poking hundreds of tomatoes through a sieve. The first bareroots will be arriving soon so I will have every reason to flee the kitchen chaos.

There's nothing quite as cool-looking(temperaturewise) as BLUE flowers. I grew Phacelia a few years ago, best blue i ever saw, next to cornflowers. The bell-shaped blue flowers with icy-white anthers were beautiful, and stirred up images of cooler weather. They do have a short bloom time, hot weather just about stops the show, cutting back helps somewhat. Give 'em a try, i believe there are 2 or 3 varieties. Good luck, and enjoy.

I've just been poking around looking for something interesting, and Crack Cream caught my eye! If you don't mind another solution..... I have a prescription cream from my dermotologist called LacHydrin.It's not the sweetest smelling stuff, but it keeps my feet from cracking and heals the cracks I get when I've neglected to use it. I have tried many, many other creams and lotions and LacHydrin (or its generic counterpart) is far superior.

I'm just not sure about this. One issue is what exactly will be done about the window trim. The plan is to remove all the painted trim around the windows, tile around the bottom (up to the bottom of the cabinets), and do a plain drywall edge around the top, but I don't know what the tile person has in mind for the sill. I've looked at lots of pictures, but can't quite understand how it can be done in our configuration. The window over the sink is 3.5 inches above the counter, and the other window (a garden window) is 2.5 inches above the counter. I was thinking we'd just put some of whatever tile we use across the sill area and then tile up at a 90 degree angle (with no sill sticking out -- not necessary) to make a square corner across. Does that make sense? Will that work? I really don't like that painted wood there. It gets dirty, and it doesn't go with anything else in our house (all the trim elsewhere is stained dark wood). FWIW, here's a picture with a few other tiles for comparison. I've pretty much ruled out the one on the left, but the one on the right (porcelain 4x4) isn't bad. The subway tile is one of the marble tiles.