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But if you are lucky enough to have your own yard – or freehold site as the proper term is – you needn’t be a gardener in order to enjoy it. You can just be a backyard potterer.

A backyard potterer’s life is happier than a gardener’s. it isn’t even always necessary to go out to enjoy one’s yard. You can think of your yard, or just take a look through the window – and all the yard comes to you indoors – or at least half of it does.

Still, it is even better to get out into the yard and busy oneself with something there. But beware – the risk of becoming a gardener is great.

 

October

 

For the backyard potterer October is a pleasant month. If you haven’t overdone it as gardener you will discover that there isn’t much to be done in the garden. Never mind that all channels – radio, TV, newspapers and all other communication pipelines harass you about this being the last minute to prepare for winter.

But if you still have kept your common sense then you realise that preparing for winter can perfectly well be left to the plants, insects and other living things. After all it is their mission here on earth.

October is one of the most emotional and most changing months. The trees still have different colours, and they change their looks each day until they are quite bare at the end of the month. The leaves can perfectly well be left on the ground – let them wait for spring, it will be more fun to rake them up and somehow there are less of them. Maybe the wind carried them into the neighbour’s yard.

October neighbours are much more likeable than for instance June neighbours too. They don’t make reeking bonfires, and they don’t clatter and thunder with their mowers and motor saws. And as an additional bonus, there are less of them. Anyone who isn’t a backyard potterer flees away from October into a cosy city room, or at least applies for help from the bank office. This saps any  noise-making strength.

October may offer wonderful autumn weather, and ten degrees of warmth in autumn feel warmer than fifteen in spring. The earth itself comes to help, warming and protecting its plants that prepare for winter.

So precisely in October it is time to get out from one’s own yard and see what goes on in the forests. Unless the backyard potterer presses into a cranberry bog the forest will receive him kindly. His ears won’t be deafened by the yelling of birds as in May, it isn’t necessary to pick mushrooms or berries, not even sauna birch whisks. The mushrooms have disappeared underground back to their mycorrhiza, the berries have gone off to somewhere between heaven and earth, and from the birches only new, efficiently sweeping brooms can be made – but the backyard potterer doesn’t have any immediate need of those.

If you are lucky, October also offers a couple of days of hard frost. That reminds the backyard potterer about the fact that winter threatens the yard and that the winter firewood isn’t ordered yet. Never mind, there is still time. And no matter that the price of firewood is about the same as that of mid-summer strawberries

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If October is kindly disposed towards you it can make you a gift of some proper storm days that will bring down the aged tree that you yourself in secret have wanted to take down anyway. And for firewood it will do nicely, that is for sure.

But whatever October might offer you, there are plants that won’t be affected by it. The pot marigolds still flower tirelessly, the chestnut drops its brown seeds, then to cover them in November with the fingered leaves, and the lilac won’t ever go yellow, but just one day drops its green leaves into the moss with such a thump that the backyard potterer would wake up from it – if he were asleep.