And suddenly it’s Autumn

This week marked the start of Autumn; and coming with it the jobs starting to take down the vegetable garden and picking the fruit that’s ripening. The heatwave meant a lot of our fruit was eaten by wasps and birds or fell off the tree before it was ripe – we lost all our greengages and most of the blackberries that were ready. We managed to rescue a lot of our crabapple harvest, but as almost all the fruit fell at the same time, we haven’t had enough time to use it and so much of it has spoilt. We’re now making jelly almost every day, although as it needs to hang overnight, it’s hard to fit it in around work – a week of early mornings is beckoning! 

We started picking some of our other orchard fruit but it’s been a pretty dismal year. We knew the plums and damsons would be scarce because the blossom didn’t set, but we didn’t realise just how few we’d get. We’ve picked everything within easy reach and barely covered the bottom of a bucket! We definitely need to read up on maintaining these trees in case we didn’t prune them enough in the Spring, or should have fed them more. It’s especially disappointing after last year’s bumper harvest. 

We gave up on our melons too – they were growing pretty well in the conservatory but the summer heat was just too much for them, and none of the flowers took. At least the conservatory looks much bigger now all the bamboo canes are down, and you can see out of the windows again! 

We’ve cleared out one of the vegetable beds and taken down the french beans and mangetout. Neither worked particularly well this year – we think because they were squeezed in around our artichoke plants and they just didn’t have enough light or space to grow. We don’t have any suitable beds in the kitchen garden now so I’m trying to encourage John to find another space in the garden that we can turn into a dedicated beans bed…! The original plan was to leave the space empty but as the wind keeps blowing our potted aubergine plants over, we decided to replant some of them to protect them – we’re just hoping that might help some of the flowers actually grow into aubergines.

We’ve also started to clear the pumpkin/squash patch, which has been disappointing given the number of plants we planted. Apparently the weather has impacted all of the UK’s pumpkin crop, but it’s still sad to pull up plants with no fruit or only very small fruit…

The turn of the season also felt like a good time to start getting the house in order for winter. We’ve had so many inside jobs that we’ve just postponed in favour of getting outdoors and enjoying the fresh air – but this weekend John took the plunge and sanded and oiled the kitchen worktop. It’s a much bigger job than it sounds – removing everything and covering it, sanding the water ingresses down and then applying several coats of oil until the surface is suitably protected. We can’t easily use the kitchen while it’s being done, so it’s an obvious job to keep putting off, although it looks so much better now it’s done. 

We’re still waiting for East Devon to give us any indication about our outstanding planning applications – we know everyone is busy at the moment but it feels like very poor service not to even reach out to say they’re busy – three weeks and not a peep! Hopefully our architect will have some success this coming week – it’s getting stressful knowing we’re due to start building next month and still not having a clear view of what we’re doing. Additionally, seeing the fuel costs rising (as we’re on oil we don’t benefit from the energy price cap for that at least), we’re desperate to try and save money in future by generating our own power – it seems so obvious to us that we’re struggling to understand why it’s taking so long for the council to come to a decision!