September. 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' - one of my favourite months. We are getting a magnificent harvest every day and I am busy putting the surplus into the freezer and making preserves. Above is what I picked one day - fennel, courgettes, a barrel of perpetual spinach (it really is perpetual..I pick it most days!) and summer purple sprouting broccoli. A good haul. 
Don't you just love the roundness of the courgette and the fennel bulb in the top picture? Look at the size of it against the spade above! Lush, abundant, beautiful fruitfulness. I just had to go on taking photos. So proud! I cleaned and sliced the surplus bulbs as I did not want to leave them in the ground to go tough. Put them in plastic bags in the freezer and have been able to eat them all winter - so good in veg bakes, and pasta sauces. I will definitely grow more next year.
The Tomato Saga! Here are my eight pots of Tamina tomatoes growing happily on a sunny wall next to the climbing french beans. I am amazed by the huge trusses of fruit and have been happily feeding them and nurturing them. In front of them you can see my four Principe Borghese tomatoes which are an Italian plum tomato that you can harvest way into the autumn and then ripen on picked vines hanging inside a shed through the winter.
I also have three troughs full of Tumbling Toms - you can see their fruit ripening beautifully in the photo below. I have grown them twice before and the cherry sized fruit has been sweet, full of flavour and abundant. But to my horror one morning I realised that the whole crop of tomatoes was showing signs of late blight.....brown stains on leaves and stalks and horrible brown bruises on the fruit itself.
A drastic haircut! Though we had already had some tomatoes I knew that in order to save some for my precious winter supply of fresh tomato sauce I had to do something quick. It was too late to spray. I took off all but the very top leaves, bagging them up to take off the site together with the damaged fruit. This is what I had left on the Taminas. I left what I could on the plants but I still had the harvest below to try to ripen in the sun in boxes. Every day I took them out into the sunny yard and every night I put them in the shed to keep them from mice. I checked every day for more brown stains and got rid of the blighted ones immediately.
This is what I did with the remaining green ones which would not ripen. A vast vat of green tomato chutney!
I was amazed how many did ripen though and I still got a bumper harvest of red sweet tomatoes for making sauce. They were not really much good to eat raw though as they were very thick skinned - I really missed having sweet tomatoes as I never buy the ones from the shops. I don't think they taste of anything so it was a dreadful blow that my usually gorgeous tomatoes were a 'wash out' as far as flavour was concerned. Next year I am going to try some different varieties (watch this space) and also be very careful how I water them. Now that I have experienced the 'dreaded blight' I can understand the horror of my Irish ancestors! Next year it is War!
This is a good batch about to go into the oven for sauce......cloves of garlic, my freshly picked oregano and some good glugs of rich green olive oil....baked until soft and then put through a sieve. I got ten bags of sauce for pizza, pasta, soups and stews for the freezer. This year I strengthened the flavour with a tin of tomato puree - it still tasted completely fresh though.
The caravan was filled with the perfume of oregano, garlic and olive oil...mmmmmmmmm!
Had a lot more success with the carrots. This is the autumn harvest for storing...we had been eating them all summer too.
Scrubbed under the tap in the Butler's sink and drying in the sun ...gorgeous, sweet carrots...
I found a couple of old freezer baskets on the farm, scrubbed them with disinfectant and lined them with cardboard. Filled with damp sand they have become my winter storage for carrots, parnsips and beetroot.
This is a picture of the fruit of one of our autumn foraging expeditions into the local fields. We were careful to research all the mushrooms and found out that the green ones at the back are poisonous. Luckily we had kept them in separate baskets. The huge ones on the left and the dark gilled field mushrooms made some wonderful stroganoff with soured cream and a risotto and the best pasta sauce. When we got too many to eat I cooked them up with butter and garlic and herbs and froze them in batches. It was wonderful to put my hand in the freezer and bring out the makings of an easy supper dish....omelettes, lasagne...... mushroom, leek and fennel with spicy chick peas.....on and on and on! And all for free.
As we come to the end of September we are fat with produce from the Patch. We have not bought a vegetable since May apart from the odd avocado or aubergine. Next year I will have a greenhouse so the aubergine will be home grown too! Above you can see one of my all time favourite veg waiting to be steamed...Romanesco broccoli. The flavour is absolutely superb...a bit like asparagus and though it takes up a lot of room and doesn't re sprout much it is worth it. It was a highlight. An autumn treat which I will multiply for next year, I'll give up cabbage and sprouts to have this wonderful brassica. We eat it dipped in butter with a cold glass of prosecco and some good homemade bread!
