Autumn

It feels like summer is over. It's the second week of September and we've had the fire lit already, the trees are turning and the weather is, as the Scots would say, dreich.

The runner beans and courgettes have slowed to a trickle and the lettuce has given up. The salad tomatoes are just ripening though - not exactly good timing - and we are still getting plenty of plum tomatoes.

We have excellent peppers this year thanks to the early hot weather

Our chocolate peppers are ripening at last, having been green for what seems like months.

In the flower garden, virtually everything has finished.The front was a bit of a disaster this year as the hot dry weather, especially when we were away from home, damaged a lot of my moisture loving plants. We hadn't arranged to water this as we never need to! A large chunk of hardy geraniums disappeared, a gap appeared in the bank of astrantia and I think the astilbes might never recover.

Digging the grass out of the permanent border

However, there is always a silver lining. The worst hit of the hardy geraniums exposed an area of endemic grass which I had been puzzling about how to remove. With the flowers died back, this became a case of simply digging it out and replanting bits of geranium root which had leaves already regenerating. Fingers crossed this will work

Four jars of dried borlottis is some kind of record!

The good borlotti bean harvest started me thinking. If were were to ever  aim for self-sufficiency, or, heaven forbid, we ever had to be self-sufficient, how well would we fare? Last year the borlottis yielded just enough to replant this year.

So, I'm recording our yields. I started late so some figures are estimated. We have one meal out a week and we will hopefully still have holidays, so we need to provide about 3,102 portions of fruit and veg a year for optimum health for 2. That's about 248kg of food.

So far, 5½ months in, we've managed about 640 portions, or 1/5th of our target. To be fair, we never set out to be self-sufficient but even so, it's not encouraging particularly as we aren't going to be able to eat everything we harvested. Look what happened to the apples we put in the cellar. And the freezer is at capacity so we can't stew and freeze them.

Nibbled fruit - in the cellar just 1 week

On the positive side, we've got some heavyweights to start cropping yet - parsnips, jerusalem artichokes and turnips. Still, I doubt we'll get anywhere near our target, especially as we are just about supplying our current needs for tomatoes and we've pretty much eaten all our onions already. We could have made more of foraging as it's been a great year for blackberries. I was a bit slow to catch on.

If we truly wanted to be self-sufficient we'd need to plant some nut trees and put more land into production - currently we have a lot of grass. We are, however, making stacks of high quality compost thanks to the ducks. Speaking of which, it's time to wash out the pond filter again - they do make an unholy mess.