Autumn is on the doorstep

We are having some lovely weather at the moment. The days are mostly sunny and moderately warm and very pleasant.  The nights, however, are becoming quite chilly, and there is an autumnal dampness in the garden when I get up in the morning.  But still not yet a frost so things continue to grow apace.

We are eating mountains of runner beans.  The Under Gardener has stopped picking from the plants furthest away from the house so we get some beans to put away for winter stews and soups.  But he is picking the plants closer to us, where we have abundant beans growing nicely.  The plants still have flowers on them!  We are also getting some quite nice zucchini - though not the gluts that we get most years.  We are, however, getting gluts of cucumbers still. Andn still they are of varying quality.  More of them are now nice and sweet, but we still get a number which are unpleasantly bitter.  We are not eating those.  And I am using cucumber in place of zucchini in our evening meals at the moment.  Not the bitter ones, but the sweet (and not sweet but not bitter ones) make a more than acceptable addition to ratatouille and curry sauces and other things where you might use zucchini. We are also eating vast number of "cucumber and ... " sandwiches at lunchtime!!  The tomatoes are just starting to ripen. We continue to watch them closely because the very first one we picked was all mouldy and grungy on the bottom. The mould looked more like blight than the mould which comes when you leave fruit for too long before using it.  But so far still so good.

The Under Gardener has now, mercifully, finished digging the potatoes.  We haven't done all that well, particularly when you take out of the equation all the potatoes which had been damaged by slugs and wireworm and other munching creatures.  So not many potatoes in the racks - but a positive mountain of prepped boilers, roasties and chips in the freezer. Probably the best of this year's varieties was the sarpo miro, which is a blight resistant, floury maincrop.  It is true it didn't seem to be affected by blight. But the slug and wireworm damage was immense and they don't really lend themselves all that well to being par boiled (they're very floury so they are prone to disintegrating and need very carefully watching).  I prepped them anyway and will see what happens.

And now the blackberries growing along the side fence in the chicken run/orchard are starting to ripen.  And the bramleys will be along soon.  Blackberry and apple pies/puddings/cakes anyone?