Welcome to Fall!

The calendar says Autumn has officially arrived and the signs were also everywhere you looked this past weekend as we moved north of the city. Just north of Toronto and bisected by the major highway that runs to one area of cottage country there is an extremely fertile vegetable farming area called the Holland Marsh. Right off the road is a farmer's market that offers produce grown in the fields that surround it. I generally stop there weekly during cottage season. This allows me to forgo super market produce for four months or so and eat completely local fruits and vegetables. In the fall the market is also the place I can stock up on storage vegetables like garlic, onions, carrots, potatoes and even apples.

This week the market was visually much different than even last week. The mums were on display and starting to bloom...

The columns supporting the covered shopping area were bedecked with gorgeous corn stalks complete with ripened corn...

And the first of the pie pumpkins were for sale...

A little further north in Barrie the parking lot plantings were showing off the benefits of the abundant rain we received this past summer. Can you believe those rose hips? They look more like little apples - each one is over an inch across!

Still further north the forest is beginning to change to its autumn colours although this pic taken at 110km or so - probably has a bit more colour than the majority of what we saw but it gives you an idea of what's going on and clearly shows what's ahead in the coming weeks.Once at the cottage it was evident our resident humming birds were not around to enjoy the gorgeous weather and sparkling water. They consumed almost no nectar from the full feeder I left behind last weekend so I'd say they're winging their way back to South America as they do every fall about this time.

This is how the beginning of autumn found the little maple just to one side of our screened porch. Just started to show colour but what great colour it is!

I made progress on Honeycomb and on the current car socks over the weekend. I'd love to post about them today but I have to confess I'm just back from dental and eye exam appointments with a lovely headache from having my mouth jacked open for an hour and a half and blurry vision from the eye drops so I can neither see to select pics or concentrate to draft a knitting post. I hope the above shots are essentially in focus, that there aren't too many typos in this post and that the first day of autumn - however it finds you and your neighbourhood is a good one for you!