Mid-September

Having said that we weren't doing very well for apples - I was listening to the apple orchard growers on Farming Today earlier in the week and they were saying that this has been absolutely the worst apple harvest for around 15 years or so. English apples are going to be in very short supply.  Which makes our basket of Bramley apples from the garden look quite healthy in comparison.

Apple pies, crumbles and cakes in the offing

And, up on the allotment, on our baby Bramley tree (which I had taken the fruit off in the spring, it being a bit small and a bit young to be bearing fruit) there are sneaky apples growing.  I think it must have had a second flowering when I wasn't watching.  There were certainly no baby fruits on it after I had had my initial inspection!

Sneaky apples growing on the allotment

And look how well we are doing for butternut squashes.  The ones that are properly ripe are copming in at around ikg each.  The new baby squashes almost certainly won't have time to ripen properly - but we'll eat them as if they were zucchini.

We have finally come to the end of the cucumbers - which have been extraordinarily prolific, even if some of them have been unpleasantly bitter. The tomatoes are starting to ripen now - but we definitely had a light frost on Saturday morning. If that keeps up the tomatoes will have to be brought into the house.

Mind you - if the weather turns properly cold that might do for the very hungry caterpillars which are demolishing our broccoli and cauliflower plants.  We had to take the butterfly cage away from them because the plants were getting too tall for it.  And of course the minute we did that the butterflies moved in, bringing their voracious offspring with them ;-(

And now The Under Gardener is getting the beds ready for winter.  We have bought the autumn planting onion sets and the garlic bulbs.  I have a new plan for the garden and the allotment for the next season. The freezers are full of summer bounty and autumnal harvest.  All that remains to be seen now, really, is what sort of weather the autumn has in store for us.  Mind you - it does feel rather as though we've been doing autumn since about June so it might not change markedly!