A difficult year for the veg

My verbena bonariensis, and stipa gigantica are dancing about in the breeze and what's left of my dahlias, after the earwigs and snails have had their fill, are boldly lighting up the garden.

This year has been a difficult year for my vegetable garden.

After a very dry spring and then the copious amounts of rain we have had from then on, many of my vegetables are a little bit behind, despite the weather being a couple of weeks in front.

Last year we had so many ripe tomatoes at this time, that my kitchen became a production line for passata and oven dried tomatoes. This year I still have so many tomatoes on the vine still green and many still just have flowers, which now at this late stage, have no hope of turning into rosy red tomatoes.

I have a few butternut squash fruits but still so many flowers yet to produce fruit so fingers crossed we get an indian summer, my vegetable plot desperately needs the sunshine.

I picked a couple of sweetcorn cobs this week and when I peeled back the outer husks, I could see that the top third of the kernels had been eaten. Whilst peeling back the protective foliage, I came across a whole range of insects. Ants, ladybirds, beetles and woodlice. I wonder which of those little blighters is the culprit!

I love seeing sweetcorn in the garden but it's only me who eats it! I have to say the rest of the family are missing out though. After picking, it went straight into boiling water and five minutes later, it was on my plate and smothered in butter and tasted so sweet. I took it outside to eat and sat on the garden wall. A little bit of heaven on a plate.

It has been a great year for my raspberries though.

I seem to be picking them everyday. They reward you with so much fruit for really so little effort.

I grow the autumn fruiting varieties. The name implies that they fruit in the autumn but I start picking from as early at July.

The beauty of these, is that they fruit on the new wood they produce from the spring onwards, so I just cut them back when they have finished fruiting and apart from giving them a good feed in the spring, that's it. They are also very promiscuous, putting up runners all over the place. I started off with 6 plants and 3 years later have about 30.

After work this week, I have been heading straight out to the garden for about 10 minutes just to sit and enjoy the peace and quite and to listen to the wind whistling through the trees.

It seems ironic that I should start to do this now that the summer has almost ended but hay ho, it's better that I have come to realise the benefits of sitting still and enjoying being outside with nature after work now, than my normal routine of firing up the computer to answer emails, whilst getting the tea on, than not at all.

Hope you get time to sit and enjoy your garden this weekend and that the sun shines to ripen those tomatoes.

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