Bam! Autumn

Are you cold? I'm cold

Well it happened- we were standing around before work started yesterday morning and one of the staff admitted they were very worried for their tomatoes. “They’re not going to ripen with these overnights” he said, and yeah… I am a bit worried too.

BUT! It is still warm, very warm, in the direct sun, so they will still be ripening (albeit slower) for a little while.

What I am obsessed with this week

Still a little obsessed with the wasps? Bees? That appear to have laid eggs and then covered over in Lesley’s umbrella stand. They did this in mid summer so I don’t *think* that they are hibernating in there…

I’m going to post in the reddit sub r/whatisthisbug, an incredibly helpful place, but for now I keep thinking I can solve the mystery alone and keep looking up various keywords on the internet (it is not going well). If you can shed some light, get in touch!

Tasks in the garden this week

We have started to ‘chop and drop’ anything which sends up big shoots, flowers and then the flowers die back until next year. It is early days so I will put more about this in a later blog.

I’m enjoying collecting my produce- this was dinner a few nights ago. I did get some capsicums, the first time ever that I have been successful here- I bought a much larger plant at the very start of the season. Those big long chilli looking things are supposedly chillis but taste like capsicum also. Great for me, but a fourth year that I don’t have any exciting chillis to pass on to people. The little pumpkin looking things are kamo kamo. My kamo kamo is so successful this year, and my family’s taste for it so small, that I have been picking them a bit earlier as these sizes are exactly the right amount for one dinner. Yummm!

A lot of vegetables can be frozen, if you aren’t too keen on bottling, or using (counts) 6 capsicum-tasting chillis at once, but it can be a bit touch and go (freezing chillis: easy. Freezing green beans requires blanching or they go soggy. What am I talking about- frozen green beans almost always taste watery and soggy anyway).

My friend Mel always has a lot of leafy greens, she strips her plants to make up batches of curry sauce and freezes them down.

I bottle my tomatoes nowadays because my kid has gone off eating them whole and raw from the garden, so we end up with a bit of a glut.

This time of year we are mostly cutting back plants as they finish flowering.

Borer beetles seem to be back with a vengeance, so there’s been a lot of jamming small sticks up the holes they have created in a bid to squish em! I also have a go at firing neem up the holes, with various levels of success..

Begin sweeping up leaves from paths. Put them in old potting mix bags and tuck them under the house, in the corner of the garden, somewhere they won’t get in your way. They will break down to almost nothing, so don’t be alarmed when you suddenly have 12 big bags! They break down into leaf mould, which looks like worm castings, and it is excellent for the garden.

Leave the leaves on the garden for now, as they are protecting the soil from the sun, and only get them off the garden if you have a bug problem.

Continue to fertilise your plants, if you used new compost or potting mix at the start of the season, the nutrients in it will almost certainly have started to run out, so top up with a liquid fertiliser or more compost.

And have a good week, everyone! The paid blog will be out a little later this week, unless I am particularly speedy tonight- we are having a house warming party and I have to scrub the house from top to bottom.. would rather be gardening!