Autumn veg

This autumnal weather seems to herald the end of the sowing season. I managed to sow the overwintering onions this week (Tosca, Stuttgarter Riesen and Ramata Rosso di Milano), some more rocket, winter spinach and mixed radishes, but that's probably going to be all for this year. I'll try to keep the salad leaves going in the greenhouse over the winter.

Bountiful harvest

The harvest is so bountiful at the moment that I've run out of jam jars for preserving. Pickled chillies, pickled cauliflower and some more beetroot and green tomato chutney used up the last of them.

Out in the veg plot it is now the back end that is the busiest, with a forest of squash, leeks and onions and mixed brassica.

Squash, kohlrabi, onions, leeks and mixed brassica

The front end still looks very nice, but the courgettes are definitely slowing down. The mangetout are finito, the cauliflowers, romanescos and broad beans as good as gone.

Gaps are appearing in the beds

Spring cabbages

 I harvested my first Swede Marian today since it felt so autumnal. They're pretty large already so I thought I might as well make a start. The next excitement on the agenda will be the first squash harvest. The pumpkins are doing very well, as is the one Uchiki Kuri plant, but the butternuts (Gourd Metro) have hardly any fruit at all. The six plants are lush, but there is only one butternut of decent size so far. Is this a bad choice of butternut or are they temperamental? I was given a 'pumpkin' plant by one of my neighbours, but it turned out to be some kind of oblong green squash. Any help in identification most welcome!

The only butternut of note

Uchiki Kuri

Pumpkin Jack be little

Mystery squash

Leeks Musselburgh

My one aubergine plant got white fly or some such. Despite spraying the leaves with washing-up liquid mixture, it doesn't look like there will be any aubergines this year. What a pity after the promising start and dozens of flowers! The melons are still continuing to swell, but will they ripen?

Watermelon update

I've also put some black fish boxes over my chicory and endive plants to blanch them. They were terribly bitter beforehand; I hope this will make them edible. However, it seems a lot of faff when there are other tasty salad leaves (like Salad Bowl Red and Tatsoi) that are not fussy. Not sure I'll bother next year.

OK, now to prepare for the onslaught of guests over the Bank Holiday weekend. A lot of produce will be consumed!

Tatties galore

This week was the big maincrop potato harvest. Pleased to report that they don't seem to have been affected by the blight above ground.

The haul of Romano and Setanta potatoes

What a workout that was and I wasn't even doing the digging! The fish boxes came in handy once again. Jim had said in the morning 'Surely this isn't going to take us all day', but of course it did by the time all the taters were stowed in the summerhouse. At last a use for our ramshackle summerhouse - potato store (and probably squash store soon).

Drying in the summerhouse before winter storage

The blemished and skewered potatoes were immediately processed into chips for dinner and several future dinners. Now we will leave the potatoes to dry under some newspaper for a few weeks before storing them in plastic bins in the ground (still to be dug in).

We've been having very windy and cool weather in the wake of Bertha so not much of a chance to do much outside. Three sunflowers are down, including the one in my photo. At least they make nice cut flowers.

Now hoping to use the break in the weather tomorrow to sow the overwintering onions to make sure we have enough next year. Our maincrop onions planted this spring are going to run out in a few days - not good planning there.

Artichoke ahoy!

Gardening highlight of the week: I was greeted by this little artichoke yesterday:

Green Globe artichoke

Since this is year 1 and I'm going by the book, I removed all the little flower heads that had appeared. I was very tempted to let them develop and eat them, but apparently the plant needs all its energy to make roots in the first year and, after all, it should crop for four years. Anyway, looks like we're on track with the artichokes!

Other than that, I planted the spring cabbages into their final positions: Durham Early, which I'd bought, and some old seeds of Pixie and Wintergreen from a friend. Despite their age, they came up in full force.

Lemongrass

I had the first of the lemongrass this week in a delicious tea. This was one of those things I'd tried growing because you can (and with a vague ambition of making tom yum soup). It's supposed to be perennial, which is always a good thing, and the cats like it too - bizarrely since they don't normally like citrussy foods, but it looks like cat grass.

The paltry outdoor tomato collection from last week didn't even make it into a chutney; they started to rot pretty much immediately. So don't bother picking fruit from a blight-affected tomato plant. I did make a courgette chutney though and this used up 1kg of courgettes! This chutney, another courgette cake and a courgette tomato pasta and we are down to quite small numbers of courgettes. I think 10 plants may not be too many for two people, after all.

Little watermelon and male flower

The watermelons have put out lots of fruitlets with female flowers, which I all painstakingly pollinate with male flowers in the hope that one of them will grow large and juicy. I might have left this one too late in the season, but let's wait and see.

The chillies are turning red

Pepper harvest coming up

The pepper family is doing very well. The Long Slim chillies are nice and hot now and there's a good crop of California Wonder bell peppers coming up. The aubergine is still flowering away, but I can't spot any fruits yet.

Since the house painting will have to wait another year, we decided to put up the roses this afternoon. Not only does it cover the bad paint job on the wall, it really makes the little patio triangle look cute:

Climbing roses

Now I only wish the weather would stay like this and I could sit on this bench with my book!

Outdoor tomato fail

As feared, the potato blight spread to the outdoor tomatoes. In one week, they went from super healthy-looking plants to dying. I ripped them all out for another bonfire and harvested what I could before the blight spread to the fruits. The resulting harvest is barely enough for a batch of green tomato chutney.

The harvest from 21 outdoor tomato plants

So the tomato strategy for next year: greenhouse and container plants on the patio only.

Apart from this disappointment, things are going well. We got ourselves a small (1.5L) deep-fat fryer this week. With all these potatoes and the nearest chippy six miles away, we wanted our own chips. So delicious, home-made chips. We found that our second early variety, Dunluce, is quite floury and suitable for chipping, not what you'd expect from a new potato. We then branched out into courgette fritters and cauliflower pakora, but the chips are the best.

The weather has not been the best so I had some rainy days to do some preserving. The first batch of sauerkraut (two heads of red cabbage) is fermenting in the crockpot. I baked a courgette loaf, one of Sue Lawrence's 'cakes that will keep'. Well, needless to say, we never found out whether it will keep. Then a quick batch of lemon curd and a beer-brine Romanesco pickle.

Pickled Broccoli Romanesco

The rain has turned a few vegetable areas into jungles:

Carrot jungle

How big do parsnips grow? Bigger than chard anyway

I've managed to do a bit of clear-out this week. On to the compost heap with most of the broad beans (though some are putting out new flowers) and all the broccoli plants. This means there are quite a few gaps appearing in the beds. I'll definitely sow some more purple kohlrabi - had the first one during the week, very tasty and so easy to grow.

Front half of the veg garden

Back half of the veg garden

And, despite the wind, my first sunflower has made it!

Hardy sunflower