October in the garden...

 

Harvesting slows and then mostly stops during October, but at the beginning of the month there was still plenty to pick, with the highlight being our one and only red pepper plant with fruit on it! These lovely pointy "Corno di Torro" peppers are a joy - with a beautiful flavour and delicious raw or cooked. We sowed the last of the seeds this year so I have those on my list to re buy! 

Courgettes were still coming too - although the increased dampness in the air tends to lead to them beginning to rot before getting to a sensible size. We still picked one or two more though. As for the tomatoes, well, we've been over-run with those all month still with the last of the fruits removed from the plants to ripen indoors. We always start them off on a bright windowsill, then any that are still reluctant at that stage get popped in a brown paper bag with a banana for a day or two and that usually gets them going. I do generally find that toms ripened off the plants are best just cooked though - the flavour isn't as good for eating fresh. 

The main job for this month was clearing things back for winter. Stripping the tomato plants of all the viable fruit is one of the first jobs, particularly as we had started getting frosts by mid-month. The final Tromboncino squashes as well - those have been a huge success and we have already planned where they’ll be going next year! 

It always feels like a daunting job to get things ready for winter - you can see above what the right-hand side looked like before we started, and the left is below…

…although I only remembered to take the pictures after I’d made a start! The compost bag is there ready to  take the tomato plants - those don’t go on the compost heap this late in the season, although we’ve had absolutely no sign of blight we still don’t risk it. Instead the plants are chopped into pieces and bagged up, they’ll head to the tip next time we go. Other plants get chopped into the compost bin of course - ready to have a second life nourishing their successors in years to come! The tomato pots will be emptied on to areas of the garden which won’t have tomatoes or potatoes grown in it in the future as the spent compost makes a good mulch. 

There is the left after most of the clearing was done - just some tidying still to do. It was a further week before we were able to turn our attention to the right hand side, which was a good thing as the compost bin was full to bursting after week one! In spite of chilly temperatures it had dropped down quite a lot in just those few days though, and we were able to get most of the remaining cleared vegetation into it. The trick here is to chop it up really well - a little more time consuming, but speeds up the actual composting process quite dramatically, and means you can pack more in! 

There - just the rhubarb still to die back, although as leaves start to naturally break off the plant we’re using them to layer into the compost to help keep the moisture in and the worms happy! The clematis had to given a haircut to let us properly access the compost bin - for a cheap Lidl plant that Clematis has been  astonishingly happy! 

So with the garden all put to bed for winter, that will be it for those posts until the spring. We will of course be planning next year’s planting, listing our seeds and deciding what we might need to buy. There will be more spring flowering bulbs to buy and plant, and the front garden needs some attention too, so we won’t be entirely idle!

Robyn.