[music]
The best thing to see in the autumn for me would be the different tree colours.
Reds, browns, oranges, yellows.
Even when they've fallen off the tree I think they look quite pretty on the floor.
Until we suck them all up!
We roughly get anywhere between 70 to 80 tonnes worth of leaves,
which we then take to our barn which then gets recycled for leaf mulch.
It's a key time of year for us,
when we're changing the planting schemes over from the summer schemes to the winter schemes.
I'm looking at which ones aren't performing well enough to stay for another season
and I'm rearranging the colours a little to make them a bit more showy for next year.
These are all of the pumpkins that we grew this year in the Kitchen Garden,
and they've been brought inside to have a final few weeks of ripening.
And that really helps them to get hard skin which makes them store better,
and it also improves the flavour because the flesh gets denser and sweeter.
Hopefully we'll have them ready for Halloween because everyone wants them for Halloween.
What we're doing this time of year this is during October and early November is
we're bringing in the exotic plants which are part of a national collection of Queen Mary II's Exoticks
So we've been bringing them in using a forklift truck.
It's the easiest and most simple and safest way to bring these into the nursery.
We plant over 200,000 bulbs each autumn,
so I think getting those all into the ground in time
is probably the biggest challenge we face at that time of year.
We all suffer from backache.
You know some of us suffer from backache.
you get into quite interesting positions when you're doing the planting.
You can see for yourself.
It's a time when we are thinking of our winter projects which most of us find more interesting
than the day-to-day maintenance of the summer months.
You can spray things or you know put in biological control after you've got a problem,
but if you don't have the problem to begin with, that's the best way of tackling it,
so keeping things clean, tidy, just really good housekeeping.
It's a great way to stop problems just destroying all your crops.
Even visiting Home Park where it begins to start looking a little bit bleaker now
and it looks lovely on some frosty mornings if you can get out,
there's some great shots you can get on camera.
So the male deer normally all have the poor feeding area,
and the females have all the good feeding area
and they all sort of stick together.
The males are in the peak of what we would class as the fallow rut.
Which is in layman's terms mating season.
Now they've got hatred for each other because they want to be alpha male to breed with all the females
So we'd work up at the palace giving rides to the visitors,
and today as it's near the end of the season we're also working out the back.
You want the least amount of impact out there, and horses do that.
You can't find us if we're working out there because we don't make any noise.
It's not like you've got a chainsaw or you know a strimmer.
There were a million of these horses a hundred years ago at beginning of the First World War.
In England there were a million shire horses.
And now worldwide there are only 1,500.
You can't keep these horses as pets they eat too much.
A horse like that will eat a dustbin full of short feed a day plus hay, you know.
So they have to have a job. And they're happier working.
You get to meet loads of people you know and you get to tell them things about the horses and the palace.
I'll never get fed up. I say the same things over and over again about these horses,
but I never get fed up with talking about them you know. They're my babies really. So there you go.
We've got a wonderful bunch of people, all ages, all personalities.
At lunch time we get a chance to play pool or darts where we have a friendly competition for a nominal fee.
Yeah well I've played for the last 27 years so I keep my hand in, but I don't tell them that.
[Chuckles]
We've got a radio. We've got towels. Power tools. Beer.
We've been doing the raffle for about 15 years.
TV.
It started off just in the actual gardens and it got to known throughout the palace,
and we've just gone biger and bigger over the years.
Some people get carried away buying tickets. They'll buy 60 quid to 100 pounds worth of tickets.
I just like raising the money for different charities.
Yeah we always put forward a selection of charity options each year,
and then we'll kind of vote amongst us which one we all feel is the most worthwhile.
Yeah, yeah, I'm quite proud you know. I'm following in Capability Brown's footsteps.
And he's probably one of our most famous gardeners,
and yeah I'll be glad to pass that on to my grandchildren and children
that I've been part of working in such a spectacular place.
You can start with the seeds and end up with the tree.
The tree behind me is a tree that I planted in 1977.
This tree thrives in amongsts other trees.
We're just on a journey here looking after these gardens.
It wasn't a dead straight boring stem and also it's got a very attractive deep-veined bark,
which is another reason why I selected the tree.
and I think seeing that transformation is a wonderful thing to be able to do,
and to work with those sort of things.