Plan B

So it's the morning of the Garden Society Show, and we're carefully unwrapping the three small but lovely Discovery apples that had been cocooned, still on the tree, in fleece to protect them from insect damage.  (It has been a good year for insects, especially flies and wasps.)  Disaster.  The first wrapping was full of ants, which had nibbled the apple; the second was full of earwigs.  With those two gone, the state of the third was neither here nor there; we needed three well-matched apples of the same variety.  Plan B was to pick fruit from the big cooking-apple tree instead.  The ripest of these, just starting to blush nicely, were also those with the most blemishes, so it had to be three that were still green.  They were indeed big and beautiful, though without the 'eat me' appeal of the Discoveries.  And, to our amazement, they not only won the class but also the 'Best Fruit and Vegetable' prize.  Even more amazing was that the runner-up exhibit was my three little yellow courgettes, despite being the smallest in that class.

Today's harvest

Since then we've had a week away in warmer climes, and, despite picking the courgettes of any usable size on all the plants before we left, have returned to several much larger beasts including a couple of offensive weapons-size ones.  In the past I've had my doubts about 'Orelia', the yellow one, which seemed to be a weak grower and with fruits prone to rotting off at the tip, but this year it's done very well.  I wonder if the drier weather has prevented the rotting off.  At any rate, the plants have produced well this year, and one of my pre-trip jobs was to make a batch of ratatouille using some of them with some of our aubergines ('Ophelia', which ripened first) and tomatoes.  Since our return I've decided it's time to start also picking the 'Bonica' aubergines and 'Apache' chillies, as well as a whole lot of our newly-ripened red (and a few stripy orange) tomatoes.

Display of local produce, Maribor, Slovenia

The markets in Slovenia had fine displays of local fruit, veg and flowers, and I've returned with renewed appetite (literally and figuratively) for harvesting, storing and using our produce.  I'm prone to letting seedlings sit too long waiting to be potted on or pricked out, and to letting plants go over without having used them to the full; I have a cold frame full of seedlings which I'm reluctant to put into the ground (because of the slugs) or into the greenhouse (because of the greenfly), and outdoors my full-grown lettuces have bolted in my absence.  So, starting as I mean to go on, I've already picked a big fistful of parsley and chopped it ready for the freezer, and will be potting on my lettuce seedlings asap.  And making more ratatouille.

Dried flowers in Ljubljana market

 
The apples this year are small (except for our usual giant cookers), but plentiful and, ants and earwigs apart, good quality.  We also have our biggest ever pear crop ripening nicely.

Apples and pear cordons

Autumn is approaching fast; the plum tree, which I managed to prune before we went away, is dropping its leaves and the late flowerers such as the dahlias are getting into their stride.  One overwintered dahlia tuber which I had labelled 'Bishop of Auckland' is not; I had started having doubts as soon as the leaves appeared, green not purple, and indeed it is 'Ambition' (this is good as I currently only have one other tuber of this variety).  It also looks like one of the hedychiums is going to produce a couple of flowers at last; the heat of the summer would have been to its liking, but it probably likes more moisture than I had been providing.

'Ambition' not 'Bishop of Auckland'!

Autumn leaves under the plum tree

Another sign of autumn is that the Met Office has just announced the first named storm of the new season: Storm Ali, with rain and gales, is due later this week.  We've just had the tail end of Hurricane Helene pass by, which has brought down some of the big apples and some firewood from the ash trees, and it rather looks as though, in all, it's a wet and windy week.  Time to get those apples into store.

Although there still aren't as many flowers in the garden as I would like, the dahlias and my seed-grown asters are providing this week's indoor colour:

Aster 'Milady'

Dahlias 'Ambition', 'Sam Hopkins', 'Bishop of Auckland'