There's a lot that happens in the garden between the last cold and grey day in August and the (admittedly also cold and grey) first day of October. Leaves re-emerge. Flowers blossom. Berries appear. The grass photosynthesizes. I wrote this entry to keep track of the progress of things in my garden for future reference. I didn’t intend to do this at the start of the month, I just realised when looking through my phone’s gallery that most of my photos were taken in my backyard.

The end of August. The irises are already in bloom. The foliage is reinvigorated. Lattice like limbs of the pruned mulberry tree form a makeshift barrier to keep Nash off the tulips.

If you look closely the first buds are appearing on the mulberry branches.

New sun patches form to be enjoyed. In the background the first shoots of new raspberry canes are appearing.

Around mid-September the darker purple irises start to bloom. The first flowers on the Brunfelsia also start to pop open.

After mowing only once or twice over the entire winter, the extra daylight and angle of the sun (along with a few watering cans of Seasol) will reanimate the grass and mowing will be an every second weekend activity in September. This is also a sign that it's time to protect the strawberry patch with shade cloth to protect them from the sun on hot days, and keep them shielded from wind and rain.

Mulberry growth will continue slowly but surely through the month, and the fruits will start to appear in clumps waiting for late spring warmth to ripen.

Around this point lunchtime salads will resume.

Lunchtime salads are a sign it's time to lay the slug and snail bait around the strawberries. Only I may eat plants.

Actually if there are some spare carrots growing in the planter box then Nash can eat some plants too.

Around the third week of September this thing will start to flower. I prune the base of them so that there's no rotting leaves underneath and they seem to like that because they grow prolifically. The shade from their leaves is the second reason my tulips didn't grow this year. (The first reason is that Nash trod all over them.)

A panorama of an October garden. There's exhausted irises, two ripe cherry tomatoes, a fully in bloom brunfelsia, some little fences that might last until next October, and a mulberry in all its glory. You can also clearly see the spot on the grass that Nash likes to roll around on her back while kicking the ground.

And that's what happened in September. An eleven photo summary of how boring my life has become.

I'm three decades into life. I have a house now. School is long over. Homework is now literally work on my home. And yet, I still find myself starting the weekend's planned home repair or improvement at 10pm on Sunday evening.

I was caught off guard by just how easy it is to buy a living thing and take it back to your house. No questions are asked, like "Do you have a big enough backyard?"
Maybe you don't have a backyard at all. It doesn't matter. You can just drive to the store one weekend with the right amount of cash and walk out with something that's going to need care and love, not to mention regular grooming for the rest of its life.

I was disturbed to discover this. I could have been anyone off the street. I was sure there was going to be some kind of psychological evaluation done at the checkout. A questionnaire that I could satisfy to not only give the seller but also the buyer some confidence that, hey, maybe you can succeed at raising a living thing. Maybe you are capable of nurturing something from infancy. Instead I now live with this gnawing fear that I'll screw up, that I'll arrive home from work, step into my backyard and find a lifeless corpse. It's been three weeks and I still feel this way despite how big and quick the growth is coming. Life seems unstoppable, and that only serves to make me fear failure even more.

And if that's how I feel about the new grass I planted, you can imagine how I feel about the puppy.