Back online

Finally, with thanks to my elder son, I'm now back online and hopefully in full working order.

With so much to catch up on, I'll start with the garden. The season has most definitely turned to autumn and many of the plants are slowing down. Unfortunately not the runner beans, the second sowing is just coming into its own and we are still picking more than enough from the first !! Next year we will plant less. At the weekend we pulled up the French beans, although some plants still had the occasional flower there was never going to be enough again for a meal. They have done very well, we have eaten and frozen a fair few.

All the onions and shallots are now out of the ground and drying, the first of the shallots have already been pickled.

Leeks, parsnips and sprouts are all looking good. We are still digging beetroot and main crop potatoes .Thankfully we seemed to have managed to stop the blight from getting to the tubers by removing the tops in time.However the outdoor tomatoes have finally succumbed. To begin with I managed to keep it in check by removing any leaf that looked suspect but the foggy wet weather over the past couple of days has finally got the better of us.
This morning I pulled up all the plants. I gave the the remaining tomatoes to the hens along with the used grow bags, which I thought they would enjoy scratching about in. They viewed both with a great deal of suspicion.

In the greenhouse only the big boy tomatoes remain, the others have all finished.Other than being attacked by caterpillars, they have cropped well if a little lacking in flavour. All the peppers have been picked.The melons have come to nothing. I'm not sure if to try them again next year and put this years failure down to the weather or if to use the space for something more reliable.

Other than the mixed leaf salad and the early radishes most of the container grown veg have failed or at least been disappointing. Especially the dumpy bag of potatoes in the yard.We had a very small crop from them, certainly not enough to justify repeating again next year.

All in all though most things have been a success and there is still plenty to come in the next couple of months, including the squash, marrows and yet more courgettes. At a later date we will decide which plants to grow again next year, which not to and how many of each.