I'm hanging on to summer

September seems to have fallen into a pattern with much of the things that I wrote on last week's Monday blog post still being true for this week.

Again the number of plot visits have lessened for more or less the same reasons. Until we have some decent rain, rather that the drizzly stuff that actually amounts to nothing more than a temporary dampening the ground, there is a limit to what we can do on the allotment without resorting to a pickaxe.

Again we have had a couple of days out and the photos that I took reinforce the feeling that autumn is but a whisper away. I know it is meteorological autumn but I am holding on to the idea that it is still summer for a few more days.

I mentioned last week that I sowed some annual flower seeds in an attempt to have some early allotment flowers. These have all germinated so it is a case of hoping they don't become slug fodder and go on to survive whatever winter throws at them. It may be difficult to make out the tiny seedlings in the photo below but, believe me, they are there. Maybe if you click on the photo to view a bigger image they will appear.

Also on the subject of flowers, a tray of small lavender plants have been hanging on for months in our garden greenhouse waiting for the conditions to improve, so they could be planted out. They just couldn't wait any longer, so I planted a few on the plot to fill gaps in the lavender bed.

The rest were used to create a lavender border in the front garden bed. Again I am hoping winter will be kind to them.

Also in the garden, in the raised bed in the coldframe area, I have sowed two lots of spinach. The varieties are Giant Winter and Amazon which is a smaller leaved variety. I was going to sow on the plot but thought that it would be more useful to have some plants at home where leaves could be freshly plucked to use in the kitchen.

We have, however, planted some winter onion sets, Senshyu and Radar and some Casablanca garlic in a bed on the plot. This had previously been home to some of our potatoes and so was workable enough to dig over and plant up.

We usually plant red onions too, but these rarely do well for us, so we have given them up as a lost cause.

So turning my attention to last week's harvest. Again, with freezers bursting, we are now picking as we need; that is other than for apples some of which are still being stewed and frozen. Hopefully we will also need to find room for some quince in a couple of week's time.

I picked our first aubergine from the plants living in the garden greenhouse. I'd like to say it was the first of many but it isn't!

We are still picking tomatoes but this is unlikely to continue for much longer. Although for a while now most fruits are free from blossom end rot we still have one or two affected by this disease. Various theories are offered up as to the cause of this affliction but all these suggest that how the plant is cultivated is to blame. If that is so, I don't understand why, on the same plant, only some fruits are affected and others are perfect. Sometimes perfect tomatoes even share a truss with a tomato that is affected. Can anyone explain it to me?

I thought that I had picked all the blueberries but I managed to gather a few more last week. We've been picking blueberries on just about every plot visit since 28 June.

The cranberries are now taking over the berry harvesting slot. Picking is a bit tricky as you can't always rely on the colour to confirm ripeness. I've found that it's a bit like harvesting mini apples in that ripe berries leave the plant without much resistance. It makes picking rather time consuming. On the plus side, birds don't seem to like them.

Another lot of potatoes have been lifted. This time they are Rooster. Unfortunately in spite of the dry soil, slugs seem to have found their way to many of the tubers.

There are still a few blackberries to add to our stewed apples but soon I'll have to prune out the old canes and tie in the new canes. Fortunately the canes are thornless and so the task will be painless

You may be wondering why the apple above has been treated to its own portrait. This is a special apple from our small Tickled Pink tree. You may remember that this variety has red flesh as well as red skin. It's very tasty too. Unfortunately the lack of rain has meant that our small apple trees have struggled to produce decent sized fruit. The one above is, (I should say was), a prize specimen, hence the portrait.

Our complete monthly harvests are listed here.

This week I am linking to harvest Monday hosted on 

Dave's blog Our Happy Acres

Unrelated musing: Just a little question. Have you noticed that fairly recently Blogger has started to indent the first word of a new paragraph? This seems to be a fallback to handwritten times when this was the correct format for the written word.  It was my understanding that this type of indentation along with 'sloping addresses' on envelopes was no longer used. This was to adapt to word processing using a computer. My question is, then has Blogger resurrected this convention. If I wanted to use an indent I could do this myself but it is annoying having to backspace at the start of every paragraph.

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett