Welcome to the SRT blog No. 70
1st October 2021 – Welcome to our blog post No. 70
The Autumn equinox was last week – and boy does it feel it now. The last rays of warm sun on Wednesday to wind, rain and chilly temperatures, yesterday.
The word “equinox” comes from Latin aequus, meaning “equal,” and nox, “night.” On the equinox, day and night are roughly equal in length.
After the autumnal equinox, days become shorter than nights as the Sun continues to rise later and nightfall arrives earlier. This ends with the December solstice when days start to grow longer once again.
Curiously, the full Moon that occurs nearest to the autumnal equinox is always called the Harvest Moon. Why is that?
Around the autumn equinox, the full Moon rises around sunset for several nights in a row, which traditionally provided farmers with just enough extra light for them to finish their harvests before the killing frosts of fall set in. Normally, the Moon rises about an hour later each night, but around the time of the fall equinox, the angle of the Moon’s orbit and the tilt of the Earth line up just right and cause the Moon to rise only about 20 to 30 minutes later each night for several nights in a row!
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Joe & Charlie at Northchurch, helped to pick most of the squash & pumpkins earlier is week. There are still a few left that need a bit longer so hopefully a mild October will help them ripen off.
In the polytunnel it’s a sea of leaves so the squash take a bit of finding – Catherine’s in there somewhere!
Shop ready
The cats having a bathe together before the afternoon feeding time.
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As you know from recent blogs, the team have been keeping a close eye on the beehives at Hemel Food Garden and now the frames have enough honey to extract some for us to jar up and more importantly, enough for the bees for the winter.
The tranquility space had a bit of a tidy and spruce up this week.
Joe put a callout on Face book the other week for a tumble dryer and a local resident was moving house and didn’t need hers, so it’s now been installed it to use to dry the hi vis every day now that’s it getting cooler. Here’s Joe moving it of the truck to its final position. He will also maintain it so that it has along and healthy life!
The daily harvest of edible flowers continues for the café meals.
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The Activity Centres teams have been harvesting their apples from the orchard.
The pathway project is well under way now.
To improve accessibility around the site they are digging and constructing a new pathway to run between the fruit area and the newly, rebuilt woodshed. In total the path is 95m long and 1.5m wide so that it is also wheelchair accessible.
It also means that he Age UK team will have better access to the new growing spaces and woodwork shed social hub to try and combat loneliness, mental health issues and dementia.
This weeks market stall manned by Lewis and Mark.
This morning Luka, Riz and Graham were working in St peter’s gardens with the sun on their backs.
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Until next week…..
