Tidying up

We said goodbye to the tomatoes, courgettes and runner beans yesterday. With temperatures dropping quite a bit over the last few days we thought the time has now come to prepare the garden for the long winter months ahead. We planted the hungarian grazing rye in the patch where the broccoli was (that part of the vegetable patch  also known as Caterpillar Heaven) a couple of weeks ago and it is doing well and growing steadily.

It's best to plant cover crops before the end of October so we decided it was now time to take out the courgettes as well as the tomatoes and make some more space for the cover crops. We hadn't been getting many large courgettes over the last few weeks anyway and the tomatoes were still being chewed by some stray caterpillars bent on re-creating another patch of heaven in our garden.

So we uprooted and chopped up the plants, which was quite sad seeing as we'd planted them all from seed and watched them grow and now we were banishing them to a big black garbage bag. However, they did well and we made some great meals and next year we'll be planting new seeds and watching them grow all over again.

We have a large bowl in the kitchen filled with tomatoes, peppers, courgettes and runner beans. We also picked some apples and there are many more to be picked.

The greenhouse and the vegetable patch is looking very bare at the moment.  It's a beautiful bright crisp morning in London and the plan for today is to plant the hungarian grazing rye mixed with some tares.