What are you harvesting today?

Er, the courgettes and french beans are doing rather well...in fact, a little TOO well!!

Don't mention courgettes or cucumbers to me ! DW has a couple of vegetarian friends visiting today, and I have told her that it is her duty to make sure they don't get out the door empty handed   

Our freezer is full to bursting, and I feel a bit embarrassed to serve up yet another meal which has courgettes or squashes disguised somewhere in it (or completely blatant, such as stuffed marrow!)

Mangetout are really motoring now. Looking forward to my first bean - looks like it will be a climbing French variety. I'm a bit annoyed with the 'Dwarf Beans' that I bought when most of my last years seed failed to germinate. I don't call things that grow to about 4' & wind themselves round everything in sight, dwarf. I am definitely going to get seed for Lollo Rosso next year. My mum gave me a couple of surplus plants & they have been fabulous.

Some things have grown uncontrolably this year haven't they. I had some peas which were not supposed to be tall peas, but clambered all over the place. And my grape vine is heading off up the quince tree now. The greenhouse cucumbers have usually been clobbered by red spider mite at this time in the season, but have made it up to the ridge of the greenhouse, so I've had to train them along overhead - strange to have cucumbers dangling from above !

No harvesting here today - we're all going to be paddling by the looks of the weather...

We're paddling here now so it will be with you shortly.

 

Plums, plums & more plums.  Even had a moderate crop from a 'family heirloom' tree that has never previously produced even a blossom.  Again I had just one greengage - last year it disappeared, this year I picked & ate it expecting it to be really sour.  It was the sweetest, most delicious fruit I have ever tasted.  It was my intention to grub the tree out as I realise we don't have the right conditions for greengage growing but now I think it will be staying even if I have to hand pollinate.
Courgettes are still going great guns & Mr Fearns purple podded beans are going really well at last.  I have loads of really tasty tomatoes in the gh - a couple of varieties that I will definitely be repeating.

How did you get on with your scant watering CH?  Having been  growing toms for nearly 40 years, this year I heard from 2 sources that overwatering causes tasteless toms so I tried minimal watering, even letting the tops of the plants wilt a bit, & it has possibly worked.  By the way, I'm still getting cucumbers.

Freebird - the jury is out on the self watering pots.  The 2 varieties I grew in them (one an F1 that I have done many times) both seemed to have a problem with fruit rotting & the non F1 variety had chronic blossom end rot which is the last thing I would have expected.  The plants did not grow anywhere near as tall as the others in grow bags & I found that I had very few but extremely large fruits.

Ploshkin - have you noticed that the purple podded beans actually have green pods? I was only copying what was on the packet, but maybe it should be 'purple flowered' (although even then I would split hairs and say that the flowers are a pale lilac colour!)

One thing I'm NOT harvesting is pears. I planted a little pear tree a few years ago, and this is the first year it's had a crop - well, five pears actually. I was planning to pick them today, as they had been very underripe last time I checked, but yesterday I noticed that the whole crop of pears had fallen on the ground, and most had been scoffed by the blackbirds! No wonder they sounded so cheerful in the morning.
The fence which runs just behind the pear tree is in urgent need of renewing, but I had stuck to my guns and said that I would like the work to be done after the pears had ripened. Now I have no pears and no fence!!
To add insult to injury, we went to Tewkesbury market this afternoon at closing time, and bought a large punnet of pears for 50p, so maybe I was making a big fuss about nothing! Ah well, hopefully next year I'll pick them earlier...

Oh no Dandelion! Sounds terrible!

Oh hard luck Dandelion. My new Victoria plum has had quite a decent little crop this year, though finished a couple of weeks ago.

I am harvesting a few autumn raspberries (Polka) which are lovely, but never very many at a time. Courgettes have slowed down but still chugging along. Runner beans - no idea what has happened. After a small flush of beans last month, now no flowers or beans. Plants seem ok though.

S'funny what you say about the self-watering pots, Ploshkin. I've consistently had my best plants and best crops ever since I started using them. It may be that they address the particular problems I have been experiencing, but not yours. Also, regarding your comments about under-watering tomatoes for better flavour, again I've had my best flavoured tomatoes when using them - though that may be more down to the fact that we live in the SE and they get longer to ripen.

Picked off the Bloody Ploughman apples this morning. They didn't quite come of easily when lifted, as is always said to be the way of checking ripeness, but I khow from experience that if I wait for that to happen I'll be picking them up off the floor bruised and full of wasp holes. I've packed one for my lunch, so I'll soon find out if I judged it right.

Also picked some Italian wild rocket -this is indeed wild in my garden; I have not needed to sow it for years now. At this time of year it is flowering and gets rather peppery and hot, which is good to me. That's gone in my lunchtime sandwiches too !

Tonight I plan to dig the rest of the potatoes, some carrots and maybe a bit of beetroot, and pick off any raspberries.

I am getting rather fed up with courgettes by now, in both senses !

Am nursing a sore foot, after a butternut squash I had harvested and left on a shelf in the porch rolled off and hit my big toe. It's better today, and has stopped bleeding, but for a while I thought the toe might be broken. Am relieved that I don't have to go to hospital, because this would mean becoming a statistic. How many other butternut squash-related injuries have there been so far this year?

A few years ago I had to go to the hospital after getting poked in the eye by a runner bean.

I can't think of any harvest-related injuries that I've had - though both of yours made me laugh!

I do remember having the step ladder out to reach apples on the tree. I was on the top platform and one side of the ladder started sinking into the ground. No prospect of getting down without upsetting it, so I was yelling for my husband to come and rescue me, with my tiny tot son hanging on to the side of the ladder for all he was worth looking petrified, bless him. I think he would just laugh now and let me fall off!

This whole grow-your-own thing is obviously more dangerous than I first thought!!

Having ignored the plants because they really weren't doing anything, today I found a perfect, big head of calabrese on one plant.

Good thing you found it before the caterpillars or slugs did! I've passed a slug in our garden a couple of times at night, when I've been out to lock the chickens in, which must be well over six inches in length. My youngest said that it was about the length of a baby's arm!!

Hooray, at long last I'm getting a good supply of runner beans - the way the weather's been I thought they might get caught by frost before I had any.
I've just dug the last of my potatoes - first earlies so they've had a good innings. The last few will go in the freezer for Xmas dinner. I'm just about to go out & pick a modest crop of damsons from the tree in the garden, it's the first fruit I've had from it.

I need another week to get any more runners - they're tiny little ones at the moment, a second flush (if that's the right term!!). We've hardly had any yet this year, as the few that were produced in the summer went from little immature ones to dreadful old toenaily ones within a very short time.

Well pleased this morning.  I was unexpectedly at a loose end yesterday evening, so went to the lotty and picked off all the Borlotti, Flageoulet and Greek Gigandes beans that were dry, thinking that the weather would not hold for ever - and sure enough, I woke up to a rainy start to the day !  Lots of beans this year - I think the flageoulet type (soissons, from the Organic Garden Catalogue) are a great bean - so versatile, I use them in Mexican dishes - great in a chilli baked in the oven in a hollowed out squash, but also in Cassoulet, and Greek φασολια (Fasolia) dishes.

I also pulled some carrots, cut the odd small calabrese, a box full of rather nice raspberries and brought back 3 pumpkins.  Don't want to risk some low life nicking them again !

When I got back I cooked Madhur Jaffery's beetroot with onions. with some beets I dug out last time - they were a bit ugly but tasted good.

We've now got a crop of lovely runner beans - at least, they look lovely! Am hoping they taste as good as they look, as we have friends coming for a meal tonight!

Courgettes - in October!  That's definitely the last of them now.
Runner beans going well & good old Mr Fearn's too although now a bit curly with the lower temperatures.
Can anyone advise on saving bean seeds (I definitely want to grow Mr Fearn's again next year).  I'm not very good at seed saving.  I left the pods on a couple of the plants several weeks ago & they've gone quite big & lumpy.  As it was going to be near freezing & then wet I took some of them off with as much stem & leaf as I could & hung them in the greenhouse to hopefully dry.  I have left some on the plants in case that wasn't the right thing to do.  I can't get the whole plants out because they are twined round bean netting & I know that the pods will never dry on the plants because the frost or wet will get them first.

I accidentally left a few beans on the plants earlier in the season which have dried well. But I've also picked pods which are beginning to go leathery and dried them off further in my shed, until the pod is crisp and more brittle. I podded tham last weekend, and they're now sitting in take-away curry containers on my desk, waiting for me to bage them up into paper bags.
What you said you've done sounds right, P, but if you have any problems let me know as I've saved lots of Mr Fearns and will have plenty spare.