Never a good time to go on holiday

With the large productive garden like ours, there is never to ideal time to go on holiday. This year we tried early September, the weather had cooled from the burning heat of the summer and the harvest was slowing down.

While we were away I think the plants decided to work overtime and we came back to some very large courgettes, loads of tomatoes, the runner beans decided to start growing after refusing in the hot weather and amongst other things I picked 78 ripe figs.

A few figs from the 175 I picked in September

The sweet peppers have done really well this year and already harvested 26 this month alone, some of them are pretty big.

Sweet red peppers

The garden does not look too bad considering the weather vagaries we have had this year, some things are at their best. The sedum ( stonecrop or Hylotelephium) is looking good and the dahlias are beginning to flower well. Verbeba Bonariensis as ever is keeping the purple colour everywhere.

Asters are in flower and add more colour at this time of the year.

Now it is raining a bit and still warm we have reseeded some of the areas of the grass which have not recovered from the summer drought, hopefully the green will be showing in these areas soon. 

Harvest

It has been a busy time harvesting this month. Tomatoes have done very well all grown in the greenhouses.

Tomatoes in the greenhouse

We do like to try out different varieties and this year was no exception. Five varieties.

Front row: Santonia,Moneymaker, Zlatava, Back row: Green Envy, Gardener’s Delight

The Green Envy are ripe when green! makes it a bit hard to know when to pick but are lovely and sweet. Zlatava are a lovely orange and when ripe the middle is red, like a blood orange was the catalogue description.

It has been a good year for pears and they are dropping off the trees, so last week we picked as many as we could reach. It is very hard to know when the pears are ripe as they do not come off  when ripe,  but before. They then need storing somewhere to fully ripen.

With two big old pear trees there is a lot of fruit. Too much to eat ourselves. I have ripened the first pickings and apart from eating fresh I peel and core them, then lightly poach and freeze ready to use over the winter, pear upside down pudding delicious! Another thing I do with pears is to dry them, peel core and slice really thinly then put the the dryer I bought from Lakeland. After 6 or 7 hours they have shrunk and become a nice chewy snack, not much to look at but really tasty.  Store in an airtight container, I use Kilner jars and they keep for ages.

 

Chewy pears