The last harvest?

Will these tomatoes never cease? Back for another basket of fruit today. And I think there are yet more to come. But if they don’t ripen I may have to resort to some green tomato cooking. I read one recently where you dip sliced green tomatoes in equal quantities of parmesan and polenta and fry. Sounds divine.

But for now it’s still on with the red ripe ones.   And here are pictures of more havested goodies today: my first batch of quinces.   Heaps more on the tree, but I picked just a few as I was amazed to be able to do so.   The trees had their first radical prune last year and they are rewarding me with amazing productivity this autumn.

The figs are still going strong.   If the weather doesn’t turn too much (and it’s cool and overcast now) the rest on the tree might ripen.   But I do look forward to planting more reliable varieties this St Catherine’s Day.   That’s the date that the wonderful Cochet Nursery sells their bare root trees.   And I’ve already put in an order. Which I must modify to add a few more.

Pause. I’ve just looked at this post. It’s very orb-esque in it’s visual imagery. Here are some upright sunflowers to break up the fruit.   It’s not often I can get one huge branch of sunflowers all looking good at the same time.   They seem to go over so quickly.   But the small garden birds are happy. Lots of seeds for them.

Okay, one last orb shot before I head up to the potting shed and talk to Artur.   These are my harvest of pumpkins this year.   Very small but rather fetching.   The giant ones of my first year in the potager are but a distant memory.   We had so much rain the first year and a half I thought I had died and gone to heaven.   But reality now sinks in – this is a dry garden, with stunning moments of wetness, just not often enough.

Right – to Artur. He is so happy sleeping in a little nest of nets up at the shed I hate to wake him and actually pot seedlings.   It’s the perfect sun trap in cool weather. And he purrs like mad.