It’s been quite a busy month, with more harvesting, more planting, and plenty of colour.
First up, the front garden is looking glorious at the moment - aiming for a colour palette of mainly pinks, reds and blues has worked wonderfully with a lovely range of colours right through from the vivid pink provided by a stunning Salvia, through the orangey red of a Heuchera which took forever to get going, but finally seems to have settled in, through to another Salvia - deep purple this time. Admittedly I did seize the chance while MrEH’s back was turned at the Farmer’s market of buying a tray of bright orange violas, but somehow even they work well in the mix!
Out the back, and we’ve still been eating plenty of homegrown stuff this month. The runner beans - although beginning to tail off - have still been providing regular pickings, and I have been picking regular tomatoes as well, with several batches of home made tomato sauce being turned out, and plenty of cherry toms for eating with my lunches. We’ve had the last few courgettes and the final cucumbers as well - with cucumbers being one crop we’ve been self sufficient in all summer, always pleasing!
We’re probably both agreed that our favourite crop of this year has been the sweet peppers - something which we didn’t even have any real faith we’d have any joy with at all, and only really grew as a curiosity. They’ve done well though with at least a couple of fruit per plant, with some of them reach a good size, too - look…
Easily as good as anything you’d buy in the supermarket we reckon - and tasty too, with a lovely sweet crunch.
We had to re-sow our cabbages after the pesky slugs noshed the first lot - the second attempt were closely guarded and kept in the mini greenhouse though and survived to be planted out - since they’ve been in we’ve lost a few but the majority seem to be thriving so that’s good news. I need to do some reading up to establish whether we should protect them from frost or if they should be hardy enough not to worry about it. We have a Chinese cabbage variety, and a classic British “Wheeler’s imperial” with both lots of seeds being freebies from our magazine subscription.
The month ended with making a start on clearing things back for the winter - and notably harvesting all the remaining tomatoes - hopefully those will ripen indoors on the windowsill!
Robyn
