Indian Summer.

The last few days have been warm and sunny, a mini Indian Summer, the warmer weather has brought a few surprises,

at last our Passion Flower has flowered,

and the Chinese lanterns are turning red,

also the Lily's which seemed to be at a stand still for months have at last flowered,

the perfume is beautiful. We had wondered what we should do about the bulbs once they had stopped flowering, but a friend put us right, just leave them. He has a garden full of lily's and does nothing to them, so we will do the same, nothing.

The Sweet peas show no sign of slowing down even though they had a very slow start, there is a big bunch to be picked every other day. This year we followed the advice of Monty Don and pinched out the growing tips when they were about six inches high, this has resulted in very long stems, the longest we have ever grown.

The tomatoes are abundant, we did grow one plant of an old variety, 'Money Maker', these are ripening now but the flavour compared to 'Sun Gold' is very disappointing, so we will stick the 'Sun Gold' unless we can get seed of a variety called 'Butchers Blood' which comes highly recommended by another blogger.
The late planting of French Beans seems to have worked as they are now in bloom so we should be picking them in a few weeks, the peas are also looking good but not in bloom yet.

We had forgotten to plant any turnips this year so we did a late sowing, these have germinated well

as has the second sowing of perpetual spinach and true spinach,  if it gets a little chilly we can pop the cloche over them.

The autumn cauliflowers are now curding up, the first one should be ready to eat by the weekend. All the potatoes have now been lifted and stored around 150lb in total, I don't think we will run out before next years first earlies are ready.
The new bed is now finished and the new plants installed, some of the herbaceous plants have also been split and re-homed, but as everything has been so slow this year there are still a lot that require splitting, the  Rudbeckia's  and Echinacea   are just blooming now, at least a month later than they should be.
There have been a few disappointments this year, the asparagus which was doing well got set back with late frosts so we only had three feeds from it, the runner beans are so late so far just the one meal and the peach tree which showed such promise in early spring with lots of bloom has failed to produce one single fruit, maybe we didn't water it enough now it's in the tunnel. Note to self, must water the peach tree regularly next year. Apart from that everything has done well.
With decent weather the last week has been spent in the garden, we have not had time for a day out other than our weekly trip to the farmers market.

This week we treated ourselves to a rib of beef joint from the new Organic butchers, Dexter beef hung for twenty eight days tastes as beef used to taste, served with Yorkshire puddings and veg straight from the garden it was superb, we don't often buy meat as we produce most of our own, but every so often it is nice to have something other than poultry or pork.