Fruit, Veg, Flowers and Slugs

My tomatoes have been cropping particularly well of late so I have been busy in the kitchen making BBQ sauce and Tomato Ketchup; the 'Super Sauce' variety supplying fruit of 1½lb each regularly. I am no Jamie Oliver but I haven’t given anyone food poisoning yet. I am not the tidiest of chefs and chopping up 7½lb or so of ‘Bloody Butcher’ tomatoes, my kitchen resembled a crime scene at one point but I now have several bottles of both sauces tucked away in the cupboard waiting to be used over the coming months. More will be made before summer ends.  September can bring some warm sunny days and there is plenty to be getting on with in the garden in the late summer sun. As well as continuing to harvest various vegetables and deadhead plants such as my Agapanthus I am starting to think about next spring and what bulbs I want to plant. Over the coming weeks it is the ideal time to be planting spring bulbs such as Crocus, Daffodils, Hyacinths, Bluebells and Tulips in pots and borders....

I mentioned in my June article that summer felt as though it was just around the corner and the sun has been shining pretty constantly since. I am not going to complain about that after the winter and spring that we had, but it does bring with it a new set of challenges to be dealt with. We have had a couple of thunderstorms but in general it has been dry and pretty warm. The Barbara Butternut Squash plants are loving the weather and spreading across the vegetable patch at quite a rate, and in fact have outgrown the space allotted them. Luckily the growth spurt on the Squashes coincided with the Pea's coming to and end so I have taken out the Pea plants to give the Squashes some extra room to roam. This year I was once again growing  Pea Bingo  which is  a  dwarf  e arly  m aincrop  variety  growing no higher than about two-and-a-half feet. They cropped well again, though in truth I probably didn't sow enough, and next year I will almost certai...