Fruit harvest

Life is odd at the moment but still carrying on in that relentless way it does. I have tried to write about my dads funeral but don’t have the words to do so…

Fly Ararics which are very pretty but not so useful - 18th September 2011

Fruiting plants haven’t done too badly this year; there seem to be plenty of apples, plums and berries weighing down the branches of trees along the road sides and in the woods and mushrooms are starting to appearing dotted around the forest waste land in the early mornings.

Wall garden; ever-bearing strawberries and 100's and 1000's tomatoes - 18th September 2011

In the garden the tomatoes are starting to ripen, the ever-bearing strawberries are still flower and bearing fruit and french beans are coming in in fits and starts.

Boston squash; possibly from one of the seeds I saved last year - 16th September 2011

At the allotment the squashes are doing well again and I have learnt from last year and harvested the ripe ones to allow the plants to put their energy into the un-ripened and forming fruit.

Look at the camera, now smile!

This is the photo my middle-sister took of me with my basket full of courgettes at the weekend, all harvested just minutes earlier from the ‘muck heap’ garden. I’ve never been keen on having ‘look at the camera’ photos taken, no matter how real your smile might be they always seem to have a fake ‘oh-my-god’ look about them.

The real point of the photo is the courgettes, other than the few potatoes that I’ve still digging up they’re the only produce being harvested from the veg garden. The purple sprouting, brussel sprouts and kale have all been caterpillared badly, I’m hoping that they will make a come back but that is going to take some time. I still have some kale and spring cabbage plants waiting to go out but I haven’t dared risk them yet, it wouldn’t take a day for them to get eaten with the amount of caterpillars still around. I took all the tomato plants out at the weekend as well; we haven’t had any fruit from them but they have been left pretty much to get on with it and seem to have blight and too many side shoots to have produced anything and what little fruit were on the plants were very small and turning a brown colour. Next year I’m going to grow bush types, then maybe they will fruit better just being left with out having the side shoots taken off and staking. I’ve already bought 100 yellow Tumbling Tom seeds from ebay and am looking for some red seeds as well. There is also a container tomato called ‘Garden Pearl’ which I’d like to grow as well.

On the plus side though we have had a few fair sized onions from the old spring onions I put in last year, we get old waste veg sacks from one of the local green grocers for the goats and often there are old bunches of spring onions in them. I only put them in to break up all the brassica plants to avoid cub root getting in but they’ve done well. They need eating now as they only have thin skins so won’t go through the winter. My free magazine-give-away strawberry plants are producing lots of runners as well, so that will mean extra fruit next year. I need to re-pot the older plants now as they still haven’t moved from the old bucket I put them in ‘for the time being’ when they arrived. The boxes that had potatoes in are coming in handy for potting things up and on, it’s turned the manure that they were grown in into really nice soil.

It’s a strange time of year really, there are still things that need doing in the garden but most of them are planning and preparing for next year jobs. Everything has started winding down a bit as well, the nights are drawing in and there is hardly anytime for good weather left, I’m still ready to get going and waiting for summer to happen and it’s already been and gone really!