A monster and some interlopers

Monster courgette and friends

Back home after a week away.  Before we went I carefully checked the courgette plants and we ate all the fruits of usable size, but I wasn’t surprised to find a couple more ready for use when we returned.  What did surprise me was the monster found lurking at the base of one of the plants! – I can only assume I missed it before, although it must already have been of a fair size before our departure; hidden by the leaves, I expect.  A big lot of courgette parmigiana is being prepared for the freezer.  It was the biggest courgette I’ve ever produced, over a foot long; the small round thing on the right of the photo is a £1 coin for size comparison.

Meanwhile, down in the veg plot interlopers have been digging in my no-dig beds.  A small patch where some salad onion seed had been sown seems to have been used as a litter tray by the neighbour’s cat (yuk); the seed was old and unlikely to germinate, so I’m not too disappointed.  Other digging is probably the work of the local squirrel, who has been busily preparing for winter by burying hazelnuts in the lawn and anywhere else he can find; he started early, excavating one of my potato plants in the summer (the potatoes were ready for lifting and didn’t suffer unduly from the disruption), and he seems to have been scratching at the edges of some of the beds with fleece coverings but fortunately not getting underneath.  The only damage has been to a few asters and antirrhinums that were bedded out for cutting and were uprooted by the digging; since then, the remaining asters have been badly damaged by the heavy rain that seems to have fallen last week (and is going to fall for much of this coming week) and probably aren’t going to provide any more cutting material, though the antirrhinums and little salvias are still going strong.  And something, probably slugs, has eaten my oriental mustard seedlings on the Hill; I thought that the mustard was too strongly flavoured for them, but obviously not!

Painted lady on the buddleja

Two small tortoiseshells, chilling out on the woodpile

Other more welcome wildlife has been about.  A hedgehog was found snuffling around some windfall apples left outside our back door one evening, and I disturbed a slow worm while weeding by the apple cordons.  The birds are currently in their ‘shy’ period, probably moulting and dispersing to winter territories; the sparrows and robin, and occasional blue tits, are coming to take food but in much smaller quantities than previously.  There are three robins in various parts of the garden, sometimes tolerating one another and sometimes not, and a blackbird occasionally appears under the big cotoneaster, presumably picking up berries, but we’re mostly seeing the sparrows and woodpigeons.  One pigeon was feeding three youngsters in the plum tree yesterday.  The buddleja had been attracting lots of butterflies until the flowers petered out mid-month; up to 9 red admirals, and good numbers of painted ladies (it's a record year for them apparently) and small tortoiseshells, as well as the whites of course.  There was a comma and one peacock, but one only; in the past we’ve regularly seen half-a-dozen at any one time.  The best butterfly sightings this summer have been the marbled white and a fritillary.  We also had an emperor dragonfly which got trapped in the greenhouse for a while, and a hummingbird hawk-moth was also around the buddleja for a few days, but now that the weather is cooling down it is presumably off to hibernate somewhere.

Emperor dragonfly in the greenhouse

Dahlia 'Cafe au lait'

The wet and windy weather has knocked the sweet peas about, but they did provide a posy for this week; I’m now stopping the dead-heading in the hope of collecting some seed from them.  I’m very pleased with their performance this year; the idea of growing them in pots seems to have worked really well, as I’ve never had such good flowering so late in the year from them.  The 'Cafe au lait' dahlias have done well, 'Ambition' and 'Bishop of Auckland' less so but satisfactorily; 'Sam Hopkins' produced one flower only, and the newly purchased 'Dark Butterfly' disappeared.  The seed-sown 'Bishop's Children' flowered quite well, and the bees really liked them, so they will be overwintered for next year.

Of the other plants, the aubergines and two small peppers were harvested before we went away, and the tomato plants left to their own devices.  The aubergine plants were grown in larger pots this year but probably not large enough; the plants only produced a single fruit each, none very large.  The tomatoes, as previously reported, haven’t done well and I gave up on them at an early stage; the remaining fruits are now ripe, and the plants will be discarded once I’ve picked everything.  They’re not going to produce anything more.  The one grown in an outdoor pot did surprisingly well, and I might try that again; even though it lost its growing tip, possibly pinched off by a visiting bird, a side-shoot was pressed into service to replace it, and that seemed to do the trick.  Worth remembering.