Autumn Gardens and Gluts - successes and failures

 Four jars (varying sizes - they always are round here) of Comice pears added to the pantry this last weekend.  I admit I am not exactly a homestead production line.  I do, however, have many more to go at.  ……and a small(ish), but quite large enough, trug of green tomatoes. There are also a load of chillis still working through in the greenhouse.  I sense some cowboy candy and Jamie Oliver’s cheeky chilli pepper chutney in the making.  The former seems to go down well with a colleague’s shooting parties and the latter we quite like, as long as it is not too cheeky.  I find chilli heat difficult to measure.

When Dame Angela Eagle exhorted us all to store a bit of extra food I suspect she didn’t have bottled pears, chutney and cowboy candy expressly in mind.  Still whilst not an obvious meal plan none will need further cooking.

S took over 2 jars of apple sauce to the MiL who promptly sent back some empty jars  …..and a butternut squash.  Her gardener, along with a friend of mine, a few counties west of here, clearly did a lot better with butternut squash than I did.  Mine just disappeared, evaporated…..  There they were, sound seedlings that appeared to grow and then …..nothing!  Not one single fruit.  That said I have circa 40 squash of other varieties so I’m not exactly short on the squash front and should be fine well into the New Year.

The vegetable/fruit garden is getting ever closer to being wrapped up for winter.  This is a first for me.  I am usually desperately playing catch up in February/March.  I am primarily a warm weather veg gardener but something always over winters and I have one and a half raised beds of leeks, carrots, turnips, kale, chard, beetroot and celeriac.  There should be other stuff but it has been that sort of year and it seems to have got lost/escaped whatever but it is certainly no longer there.  Not so much of a whiff of a fennel all year and not for the lack of sowing!

Every year something works and something doesn’t and I’ve given up on the rhyme or reason of some of them now.  I do appear to have done ok with lemon grass this year.  Not entirely sure what prompted me to sow lemon grass.  It is not a big use one in our household - lemons, lemon verbena even lemon balm on occasions but lemon grass, not so much.  Still I have an old recipe book of Sophie Grigson’s which references lemon grass specifically and a Wagamama cookbook somewhere so there is bound to be something, in one of those, to get this particular garden success story for 2026 into the kitchen.  

The pak choi and Chinese cabbage are not likely to be joining it as flea beetle (or something similar is not making for attractive looking veg.  I certainly don’t need any autumn raspberry recipes either!

I have tidied up the flowering pots and the passion flower which was blocking light from the dining room window.  Generally, however, the non food part of the garden is looking a little neglected.  This, it has to be said, is par for the course.  I am hoping that I might get chance to tidy the front garden up before the weather breaks but we shall see.  

Weekends have gone in a blink of an eye recently and this weekend coming we have a day out planned at the motorhome show at the NEC Birmingham.  The longstanding plan was to check out some accessories though, since we are lacking the actual motorhome as yet, that would seem a little premature.