Goodbye Summer...

With temperatures set to drop close to freezing later this week, and squash plants turning brown and straggly on the plot, we've had to bring in the last of our summer crops.

I am very disappointed with our pumpkin/squash harvest, which totals a measly 5.5kg. Most years we bring home whole pumpkins weighing that much! Here it is: two Baby Bear pumpkins, one stunted and underripe Atlantic 'Giant' (ha!), one miniature Sweet Dumpling, two smaller-than-usual Thelma Sanders and one very tiny and very unripe Butternut. Sigh.

I'm most disappointed with the Thelma Sanders - in all previous years they've reliably produced several big fruits per plant - this year just one small one each. What went wrong? Slugs were certainly a major problem this year, destroying two whole Crown Prince plants and eating the other Atlantic Giant pumpkin, which was looking really good early in the season. Perhaps they thrived in the cool and damp summer. Perhaps I should just be spending more money on pest control... I planted the seedlings out a bit late too, which meant they were a little pot-bound and took longer than usual to settle in. And the weed jungle which came up while we were on holiday couldn't have been timed much worse and gave the young plants a lot of competition. Hmmm. Must do better next year...

These will sit in the sun by our back door for a while now to finish ripening (hopefully) and for the skins to cure for storage (not that it'll take long to eat this little lot).

Still, it's not all bad news - we have dug up another 13kg potatoes, bringing our total to something around 30-35kg, and we even found a late handful of strawberries and raspberries!

In the garden, the tomatoes are still going - they've given us fruit since the beginning of July, sixteen weeks ago! Despite blight finally hitting the plants about a month ago, very few fruits have been affected and they're actually still producing! The plants look a total mess though... Today I will pick the rest of the ripe fruit, but I think I'll leave the green ones where they are just to see if they can continue to surprise me...

The courgettes and cucumbers have just about finished now, so I've picked the last fruits to keep in the fridge until I'm ready to use them, so that just leaves the peppers, and there are so many! I'm wondering whether to just haul the plants indoors on cold nights, rather than picking them all at once and trying to eat them all really fast! I think I'll overwinter a couple of plants anyway, but they're not small so it'll be interesting...