The Verdict

Whilst not a total disaster the plots haven't quite escaped the blight and the slugs whilst we've been away but then given what we heard about the continuous, torrential rain, that can only be expected.

Rescued the tomatoes off the bedraggled looking plants and sorted into 2 piles - blighted and not-yet-blighted. Looks like a bumper year for green tomato chutney! The tomato plants at home are still blight-free still so I'm hopeful of some proper ripe tomatoes to eat.

Although very mildewed the winter squash have been very productive and there are a lot of fruits of almost harvestable size. I'm particularly impressed with the 'Thelma Saunders' Sweet Potato squash from http://www.realseeds.co.uk/ as it's been prolific! And in the photo above you can see that there is new fresh growth on the courgettes but I think this might be their last encore of the season.The slugs have been quite well behaved for slugs...but they've removed any trace of what should have been my get-them-in-quick late sowing of dwarf french beans (you can just see a couple of seedlings hanging on in the bottom left), desecrated the pak choi seedlings again... and they've started attacking the red cabbage although they're of a decent size to withstand a fair amount of munching.

And the best homecoming 'present' was eating these 2 lovely specimens...

At least the dismal weather stopped them from ripening too fast whilst we were away and means we can eat all the rest (another 10) yeay!!

'Chokes are go

Spent a couple of hours with MJC yesterday evening finishing off weeding (lots of couch grass roots, grrr!) the Jerusalem Artichoke beds and tucking them up with a cosy blanket of well rotted horse poo! There's a farm/riding stables a couple of miles down the road that lets you shovel as much of the brown gold as you can transport, for free. So we filled the back of the family stationwagon with a few barrow loads.

As we were putting the last artichokes in I noticed that the sky was really pretty (not sure the photo does it justice though).