Good day in the garden

A lot of the summer crops are coming to their end and winter crops are calling to be planted (so they can get a head start on growth while there is still some warm weather about). So yesterday morning I spent a couple of hours in the garden cleaning out the old plants - out came the lebanese cucumber - which has given us an amazing constant supply (actually oversupply) of cucumbers; out came some cherry tomato plants - which gave us more tomatoes than we could cope with, resulting in a stack just dropping to the ground and rotting (or been eaten by the chooks); and we harvested our last crop of potatoes - which gave us a reasonable yeild.

I still need to find some more time to pull out all the roma tomato plants - which have made us some yummy roasted tomato sauce and semi-dried tomatoes; the pumpkin plants - the four I planted have only produced a couple of very small pumpkins, the one t

hat sprouted randomly by itself has produced 6 nice large pumpkins; a couple of the zucchini plants - the green ones have got powdery mildew all over them, one of the yellow ones seems to have got a last minute growth spurt (I can see lots of little zucchini on it); and the basil - which has grown very well and will make a nice couple of final batches of basil pesto.

After all that is done and I've dug in some sheep poo and compost into the garden beds, it will be time to plant out the winter garden. I've already planted out some root vegetables -

carrots, beetroot (normal purple as well as golden), swedes and

turnips - as well as some leeks. I still need to sow some rocket, spinach and swiss chard for leafy winter salads. I also have a collection of cauliflower, broccolini, romanesco broccoli and bok choy seedlings that I'm carefully caring for in my makeshift glasshouse/shadehouse waiting until the cold weather really

arrives to get rid of all the cabbage butterfly caterpillars (which would happily munch them into oblivion) before I plant them out.