Courgettes, I've had a few ...

... and I'll be having quite a few more, I think.  Six courgette plants is really rather too much of a good thing, although I've managed to deal with all the crop in the kitchen so far, without letting any of them turn into marrows.  The other glut at the moment is the plums; not such a heavy crop this year, but this made them easier to thin out and the remaining ones are a good size as well as reasonably sweet.  Fortunately most of them are low down on the tree (I'd guess that frost damaged the blossom further up) which makes picking easy; we leave the higher ones for the birds, and indeed the blackbirds are enjoying them greatly.  The raspberries are now over, the apples still to come.  Of the veg, the last broad bean plants succumbed to rust and are now gone, and the runners very, very belatedly planted out.  The leeks are still waiting to be transplanted, but a few lettuce plants have gone in and are doing well.  In the greenhouse, my very late tomatoes are in their growbags and doing nicely, as are the aubergines (I still live in hope of getting a crop from these!).

... a few more ...

... and some plums

On the flower front, the sweet william are pretty much past, but the pinks are still flowering away and the late summer flowers (Phlox 'White Admiral', Japanese anemone and the like) are starting.  The dahlias are a very mixed bunch; 'Bishop of Auckland' and 'Ambition' are doing well but the others have done little (in fairness, some of them are swamped by the dogwood and other neighbours) and I think 'Bishop of Llandaff' has disappeared entirely.  The big success this year has been the sweet peas.  I've grown a better selection of varieties, I think, and given them rather better positions in the garden (along the front of the veg plot, alongside the courgettes), and there has been a vase of them in the house continually for weeks now. 

The weather has improved, with a lot of warm, sunny days; in fact the garden is now very dry and I've had to water the more susceptible plants.  The dry border at the bottom of the garden is faring rather better this year now that I've moved the moisture-lovers; only the Lysimachia clethroides is flagging in the heat, and the new eryngium seems happy.

The sparrows seem to be on their last brood of youngsters and are still feeding them, though the juveniles of other species appear to be independent.  There are a number of young blackbirds, a couple of young dunnocks and a very independent little robin who tries to see off the sparrows.  There was a family of mistle thrushes in the rowan tree one day, feeding on the berries, and there are young coal tits about too.  A few sparrow feathers on the lawn suggest that the sparrowhawk is also still around, and a red kite was circling the other day.  There are also a lot of house martins feeding overhead, though I've seen few swallows and hardly any swifts here this year.  A nuthatch has been tapping in the trees at the bottom of the garden, and the yellowhammers are still yammering away in the nearby hedgerows.

After the outbreak of bird pox here a year or two back there have been very few greenfinches about, but I have seen a male here recently and presumably he and his mate have raised a brood as unfortunately we found a dead youngster below the dining room window one day (with the usual tell-tale mark on the window where it had hit).  He was duly buried in the usual gooseberry bed.  This also became the last resting place of a dead rat which one of the local cats kindly left for us; obligingly it was left under one of the gooseberry bushes so all I had to do was to dig a hole next to it and tip it in.