Indian summer

Well, I have a confession. We did nothing on the plot all weekend, even though the weather was great. But we do have an excuse... Adam was laying a patio in the back garden, and I was decorating the spare room. So, we were keeping ourselves busy - just not at the allotment.

Then on Monday I was overcome with a sense of guilt and neglect. How could we have left it a whole ten days since we last went down? What about the weeds? What about the snails? We might have become over-run with squashes and courgettes, and some more sweetcorn might have ripened! So we popped down on Monday evening to find that the sky had not, in fact, fallen in and the weeds had not taken over the world. We had one big courgette (almost a marrow) and a few smaller ones, as well as a couple of small squash and lots of runner beans. Apart from that, everything seemed to have been taking care of itself quite nicely. Certainly the weeds aren't growing as fast as they were, and the courgettes aren't ripening quite as manically. I guess that's due to less hours of sunlight, plus the fact that a few of the courgette plants have succumbed to mildew and others seem to have been affected by the colder nights.

My Dad very kindly got the strimmer going properly over the weekend. He took it home and re-built the carburettor, I think, as well as re-attaching the 'stop' button. (That wasn't really a necessity before, as getting the thing to stop wasn't an issue.) Anyway, this now means that we can strim our paths and edges to our hearts' content, and it'll make a big difference to how neat the plot looks, especially now that things are starting to die back and it's all looking decidedly autumnal.

Easygardener from greenforks.com left a comment saying: "One of the upsides of the end of the season is thinking about what to plant next year - and what not to repeat - in my case that would be carrots!". Luckily for us, our carrots are now doing fine, after many, many attempts. But I whole-heartedly agree with the sentiment about looking forwards to 2009. I think I get most excited when we're planning what to plant next, flicking through the seed catalogues and choosing the exciting-looking varieties. There are quite a few things that we probably won't bother with again, one being asparagus peas. Who decided they tasted like asparagus, anyway? They taste more like... well, what I would imagine eating grass tastes like.