Home-grown

Figs

After our neighbour’s lovely dish of figs, we’ve managed a couple of our own; not as big or as beautiful, but not at all bad (and they tasted good).  I was quite pleased with them.  We continue to have large quantities of tomatoes and courgettes (pasta sauce, anyone?), lovely lettuces and a few beans; the climbers are very late, having been munched when small by the rabbit and only slowly sprouting from the base again.  And of course there is a huge crop of apples.  Not at all bad for a season when I’ve done so little.

Autumn flowers are starting to show as well.  There’s one big Dahlia ‘Café au lait’ flower, some rudbeckia blooms and a nice little pot of fuchsia, and the antirrhinums are throwing up a second flush of colourful flowers.  And I’ve obviously done something right this year with the nerines; after a few rather lean years they have produced over a dozen flower stems.

Dahlia 'Cafe au lait'

fuchsia (unknown variety)

The birds are sorting themselves out for the winter.  The robins are claiming their territories, tick-ticking at each other and occasionally singing sweetly across the lawn.  While humans regard fences and hedges as the boundaries of our territory, for birds it’s open spaces that divide up the land, and lawns are disputed areas; the robins may come down briefly to pick up a tasty morsel from the grass, but they don’t stay long.  There are a pair of warblers about at the moment, and a greenfinch was down today, but otherwise it’s the smaller birds and the pigeons/doves that are coming to the garden right now.  The blackbirds, when they show themselves, are still moulting; and anyway, there’s plenty of fruit in the hedgerows, so why would they come to the garden?

Sliding into autumn

 

August blackberries in the hedge

The long, hot, dry summer lasted well into and beyond mid-August, bringing early blackberries – a huge crop in the hedgerow opposite the house – and a second spell of unusual heat, slightly more moderate in its temperatures this time (only hitting mid-thirties C) but lasting for a week or so.  Since then we’ve had more pleasant weather with some intermittent rain, ranging from light showers to a few real downpours and a couple of noisy thunderstorms, all of which coincided with the announcement of an official drought and hosepipe ban; it will take more than a few autumn rains to replenish the water supplies after such a hot, dry period.  The rain brought an autumnal feel lurking behind the late summer warmth, with evenings drawing in and cooling off and mornings sometimes on the chilly side until the sun gets going. 

The garden is looking dishevelled, and not particularly colourful, but is greening up again with the rain.  Apart from one or two of my smaller pots, I don’t think anything has actually died of the lack of water, although interestingly much of the ground elder has frizzled away; I suppose it’s too much to hope for that it has actually died, but you never know.  It has been a very good year for fruit, and not just the blackberries; the apples are some of the best we’ve grown, and plentiful.  The tomatoes, too, have done well, producing a big crop of cherry tomatoes in the greenhouse, but the two ‘Harzfeuer’ plants in pots on the patio have also been very successful; I don’t think it’s an F1 variety, so I’m intending to try saving seed for next year.  The tomatoes and apples did very well at the local Show!

My still-small fig plant has produced a few moderately-sized fruits, but they went from rock-hard to overripe very quickly.  I’m encouraged, though, especially as its parent plant, elsewhere in the village, has produced a large crop of big, juicy figs, a few of which were donated to us!

Not mine!

We usually see a hummingbird hawkmoth on the buddleia in August, but this year I counted three at one time, and there are reports elsewhere of them doing well this year.  I was struck this summer by how the winter savory seemed to attract lots of bees, and of different species, so I’ll look to take some cuttings to spread it around the garden.  Can't have too many pollinators!

Winter savory - with one of its bees