End of the Season?

 It was rather cold and blowy down the allotment today. I guess Autumn has finally turned up to say "Game over peeps". Certainly the courgettes are now just a pile of dusty and dead leaves.

But hidden in amongst them are the odd one or two. Plus there are a few tomatoes hanging around slowly ripening, and in the greenhouse the chillies are still turning out the odd one or two spicy delight.

But as for the beans, well they never really amounted to much this year. I guess the cold weather when they were just sprouting kind of stunted their growth, but we got a few. The rest we've left to turn into bean seeds, hopefully for a better crop next year.

Either that or I'll just throw them in a stew and be done with them. It's not like they're magic beans.

On the subject of Beans... I guess we should consider the year effectively over. I probably won't grow anything over winter but I am tempted by Steve's suggestion of Field Beans. Of course I have to be careful which bed I put them in because the lower beds of ours have a tendency to get flooded in the winter months. But we do still go to the plot at least once a week (mostly to off-load our compostable waste) so having a ready source of greenery to eat might be a good idea.

(Incidentally... 400th Blog Post!!)

Breaking the 4th wall

In the Film or Theatre industry, breaking the fourth wall occurs when the actor turns to the camera/audience to say something directly.

Down the allotment, the fourth wall has been broken by a delivery of manure.

Whilst it's nice to get a manure delivery, I think they've gone a bit overboard in off loading it. The fence posts have been pushed over and many of the slats making the bays have been broken with the sheer amount of straw and other "stuff" that's been deposited.

Well I can certainly use a lot of it to re-fill the courgette beds over winter. I just need to wear wellies, climb up that mountain and start shovelling. If I make sure the beds are covered overwinter, I should be ready to go in next year for more Crown Prince.

We've decided that we really, really like the CPs so we're going to make sure that we plant more of them, and less of the normal courgettes. We will plant some of course. But this year we've had way more than we really need. Even so, today we're still getting a load of them... and a big "George".

I fear though, that we are at the end of the Tomato run. We might get the odd one or two over the next few days, but we're pretty much done with them now. We've started getting rid of some of them to that we don't have an issue with blight in the not too distant future.

But tonight, it's going to be a salad for dinner. And tomorrow... back to courgettes.

Traffic lights in the Kale

We have a rogue load of tomatoes growing in the kale bed. Now the kale is looking a little the worse for wear as most of the leaves have been duly lunched upon by various critters, and it also seems to have a bad case of white fly at present. But the toms are doing OK. In fact they are producing some decent vines of fruit. The colour cascade looks like loads of little traffic lights.

Meanwhile, it looks like the poor old courgettes are on their last legs. The leaves are starting to look a little tired and have a covering of mildew.

But they're still churning them out. We're still collecting loads of them for dinners. Soups, stews, grated, baked, or fried. And we expect a few more yet before they finally give up.

We have harvested the two big "George" marrows. These will become our seeds for next year. One will stay in the shed over the winter, the other will sit on top of the cupboards in the kitchen.

Time to start planning next year's bed rotations and crops.

Coming to the end of the season.

It's coming to the end of the summer season on the allotment. That doesn't mean that we're out of produce as the plot is still pretty plentiful.

Firstly we have the classic courgettes which are still putting out a load of fruits. I've totally lost track of just how many we've had, there have been so many. We also grabbed a few beetroots. The big beetroot at the front was a rogue one which must have self-seeded from last year.

Loads of tomatoes too. The yellow ones are Ildi which have also self-seeded from last year. A few chillies which are ripe enough to pick (still more to come) and a Crown Prince which we are going to try out. We have a few CPs which managed to survive the cold snap earlier in the year, so hopefully they will last us a little while.

We're not really planning on growing anything over the winter. But we might plant a few turnips just to see if they come to anything. We planted a whole load back in April, but the incredibly hot spring forced them all to bolt to seed so we didn't get anything. Hopefully slow growing over winter may produce results.