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[13th September]

I spent the afternoon going over the tomato plants, trying to tidy them up a bit. As I think I’ve mentioned before, my father-in-law grew the tomatoes this year, but hasn’t been happy with them and of late has largely given up looking after what is left, content to just pull a few cherry tomatoes off the vines to have with salads. Today however my wife wanted a decent pile of tomatoes picking to make pizza sauce tomorrow. So I spent a hideously sweaty (you know it’s bad when even you can tell how bad you smell) afternoon in the polytunnel, weeding, picking all the ripe large fruit, sorting through all the “windfalls” to either keep or throw them in my son’s anaerobic digester, removing any split fruit and generally tidying up the plants a bit, until my hands were black with tomato sap and pollen and tingling from having grabbed one nettle too many. There are still plenty of cherry toms for the in-laws and actually quite a few ripening larger fruit that weren’t visible before I got to work, so hopefully there’ll be sufficient time for them to finish before we have to call it a day.

I think we’re getting very close to the point of picking all the ripe chiles too. We have one string in the airing cupboard drying at the moment. I’ll do the same with the rest I think, leaving the green ones on the plants as long as possible.

[12th September]

Perhaps this should really be my first proper “Veg plot 2021” post. I have all these plants growing in the greenhouse, many of which will need to go out into beds in the next few weeks.

So today I thought I’d best get on with preparing the beds. Because I still have things in the ground I couldn’t actually do a complete bed, but I have shifted some of the “green waste” compost that I bought earlier in the year and made up half of two beds where the potatoes were planted earlier in the year.

I probably have room for a third “half” where the peas were once I’ve got rid of the perennial weeds and a fourth once the squashes are harvested, but these two should do for the time being. I’ve used woodchip for a path between the two and there will be one all the way around the outside eventually (I have loads of cardboard saved up for weed suppression), but I ran out of steam for that today. I’m not entirely sure there’ll be enough of the green waste compost and our compost combined to do the entire area and the beds in the polytunnel, but I’m happy to order more of the green waste stuff. I have found the occasional piece of plastic or stone, but they’ve been quite rare and I’m not going to get distressed about it. I’ll worry about ordering more in the new year though. By then I should have a clearer idea of what’s what as the parsnips and some of the brassicas are going to be in the ground for quite a while yet.

I’ve been toying with the idea of trying to coax some of my pepper plants through the winter since they are perennials after all. However, a bit of a niggle has struck me.

I assume that they’ll show little sign of life before late March and probably more likely into April, by which time it’s rather late to be sowing replacements if it turns out they didn’t make the trip. I do normally like to get my peppers (and tomatoes) out of the starting blocks in mid January though perhaps I need to be rather more circumspect about that now. This year we had some exceptionally late (mid April) frosts that killed off a lot of my father-in-law’s tomatoes not long after he’d planted them out in the polytunnel. Over the previous few years we hardly even had frosts in January and February. Perhaps sowing in several batches might be a good plan, so replacements are already growing in the event that the first ones do get hit. Or I could insulate the greenhouse with some bubble wrap and get them into larger pots in there before they go into the polytunnel a bit later on.

[9th September]

The seedlings in the greenhouse are going great guns now. Loads more of the onions have come up, and the chervil and coriander are also coming to life. Possibly one or two of the lettuces, too, though they could just be odd weed seeds that have got into the compost. Despite being in the greenhouse the onions have developed an obvious “lean” towards the sunny side — a sign I guess that light levels are already dropping and the Sun is lower in the sky. Every warm outdoor surface seems to be covered in flies at the moment as they try to take advantage of the last of the summer’s warmth. There are hundreds upon hundreds of them though, which is not pleasant if you walk past and disturb them without realising they’re there 🙁

We’re having fajitas for dinner tonight, made with a mixture of sweet peppers from the polytunnel — green, creamy-yellow and purple so dark it’s almost black. I noticed one of the green ones was starting to turn yellow, so we’ve left that on the plant to see how far it will ripen.

[7th September]

I think I’ve posted before that growing plants from seed is the nearest thing there is to real magic. I nipped out to the greenhouse this lunchtime to find a few more spinach and chard seedlings had sprouted, but also the first two onion seedlings had appeared as well, so small that it wasn’t even possible to tell that their “folded over” shoot was actually folded over. I’ve just been out again and all of a sudden there are dozens of them! Very pleased about that, I have to admit.

A quick stroll through the polytunnel and around what is now a rather bare-looking veggie plot suggests that the butternut squash plants are not long for this world. The leaves are definitely starting to turn a more yellowy green. I reckon it will probably be harvest time before the month is out. Still a handful of fruit left on the courgette plants though. They’ve been really good value this year. The comics are saying that September is going to warm up considerably with temperatures reaching 25C and possibly lasting into October. I’m disinclined to give them much credence, but if it does happen perhaps we’ll see the courgettes keep going even longer.

My daughter and I pulled a huge amount of ivy off a barn wall yesterday. The more unmanageable bits (a couple so heavy that I struggled to even drag them along the ground) went on the bonfire heap, but we fed a trailer load into the shredder this afternoon and put it in the compost bin.

I also planted some land cress. Being in and out of the greenhouse a fair bit whilst seeds are germinating has been fascinating. Yesterday morning there were a couple of spinach seedlings that had sprouted. By the afternoon there were at least half a dozen. This morning a single red chard seedling had come up and now there are four or five. I can’t wait for the onions to start sprouting 🙂