September 2024

Within the garden I’m currently only able to record the temperature which shows no records were broken. It was a normal September starting off by hanging on to the warm summery days, ending in full on Autumn with winter not far away. We have just built a rain gauge logging the amount of rain each day but have yet to put in place any code for charting it, maybe next month. If only we had, we would had seen how much of the second half of the month it rained, sometimes very heavy.

Lowest 16.1c, highest 25.9c, average 19.2c

In moments when it was not raining, I picked the borlotti beans which had dried off, even through they were wet from the rain. I put them in the oven on the lowest setting possible in order to finish some of them off and then podded them. They will keep as dried beans for the rest of the year and we have already been using them. We grow much more of them this year and I think we’ll keep with that trend next year and do much more again. Something you can grow and then store/use, with ease, throughout the year is always good.

Most of the month was carrots, tomatoes, sweetcorn. Our first year for growing sweetcorn and something we will grow a lot more of next year, a real success. Tomatoes, having looked after them well in the garden (outside) they paid us back by giving plenty. We eat loads, we gave loads away, we made a lot of the best ever tomato source.

For some reason I planted double the number of runner beans which meant we were eating, giving away, and freezing lots. There is no room in the freezer for ice cream until we start eating the beans. The problem is, the beans keep coming and the frozen backlog never diminishes.

Ridge cucumbers gave us some nice thin long ones looking more like traditional cucumbers than the small gherkin looking ones.

Not so good with beetroot, a lot just did not grow, maybe it was the seed. Chilies where a bit of a fail too, just one from all the plants. The plants suffered from white fly and looked like they struggled as soon as they started growing. They were from a kit from Wilkos, we weren’t going to grow plants from seed this year but it was given to us as a present so thought we would give it a go. Next year, we’ll buy them in as plants, maybe.

	2024 B/F £197.04
			IN	OUT
	beetroot – 55g		£0.23
	pumpkin – 539g		£1.19
	carrot -1.356kg		£1.02
	borlotti beans – 506g		£1.21
	french beans – 113g		£0.76
	runner beans – 1.24kg		£9.76
	courgette – 630g		£1.89
	corn on the cob – 2		£1.40
	ridge cucumber – 3		£4.95
	tomato – 5.900kg		£23.60
	apple – 1.030kg		£2.27
	turnip – 600g		£2.75
	chilies – 1g		£0.01
	WEEK TOTAL		£51.04
	RUNNING 2024 TOTAL		£248.08