Somehow I suddenly seem to have loads to do this weekend. I’m not entirely sure how that happened 🙂
This morning I harvested all the ripe tomatoes from the polytunnel. I was expecting them all to be turned into pizza or pasta sauce, but my wife says she’d like to dry some so we’ll have to see what’s left.
That done, I removed all of the plants that had no more fruit on. I was astonished to find how far the roots can spread when they’re not artificially confined by growbags, pots or raised beds. One plant had roots that were more than four feet long when I’d pulled it out, and even then the ends were snapped off!
I doubt that the remaining fruit will ripen much more, but we’ve got enough on at the moment without thinking about making stuff with the green tomatoes, so they can stay where they are for the time being.
I also removed my last courgette plant, but not before harvesting the last of this year’s crop — these four finger-sized fruit.
Any other time I possibly wouldn’t have bothered, but as the crop has been so poor this year I felt I couldn’t let them go to waste.
The rest of the day was spent mowing the orchard for the last time. Hopefully tomorrow I can harvest some apples, and indeed crab apples which, like the sloes, seem to have done very well this year but are quite small. I’d also quite like to get started on the new asparagus bed as I’m running out of cardboard storage space 🙂
And I must try to remember to pot on my pineapple plant and move it indoors for the winter.