Signs of Summer Ending

 Old sweetcorn and powdery mildew courgette leaves

When you think about it there are hundreds, no, thousands of signs around telling us that the summer is ending. I am noticing that walking the dogs tends to be in the dark, there are more leaves on the ground and the ones left on the trees are turning quickly. There’s also a nippy breeze and I am wearing a hat for warmth instead of sun protection. Blackberries are there for for picking and the apples are ripe on the trees. Thankfully I haven’t seen any Christmas advertising yet but I’m sure that’ll be here soon. 

The back garden is where I am seeing most changes to the season. My courgettes are still trying to grow, they have new flowers coming on the stems but the plants have succumbed to powdery mildew due to the cooler, damp weather so I doubt any more courgettes will appear.

My tomatoes are staying green and their leaves are also going brown so I will be taking the fruit off and ripening them up next to a banana on the windowsill (I’m not making phallic images, the bananas are supposed to speed up the ripening process) All of the pea plants have gone and the bean plants are hanging in there but the runner beans are getting a bit blotchy with the cooler winds.

I have one lufa surviving in the tunnel. The earwigs have nibbled every other one. This is a bit too late though as mildew is getting to the leaves so the solitary back scratcher probably won’t grow any larger than a pencil before the season ends. I’m not sure if I will grow lufas next year as I can’t really think of a way to keep earwigs off the plants and I couldn’t be bothered with something really high maintenance that I would have to keep vigil every night.  I like the simple to grow, high yield vegetables and lufas are not in that category. Neither are sweetcorn. I harvested the last two today and although they look well they were really tough and inedible, even after liquidizing. Somehow the resulting goo had the ability to suck all of the moisture from your mouth and you were chewing it for hours. Not nice, I don’t think they will be on my wish list next year.

Preparing for winter

Apart from just watching annuals decay and roses just staying as buds and not opening in the garden, there are some things I could and should be preparing for. My first job will be to move the cacti indoors. I have repotted them so they will be happy for the winter as long as I keep the frost off them. I didn’t put most of them indoors last year and they survived as there wasn’t really a frost, I doubt I’d be that lucky this year. My other frost sensitive collection is air plants. Most of them have survived the summer in the tunnel but there have been a few casualties. Maybe it was too wet or not humid enough, you really can’t tell with these plants. 

They don’t wilt like rooted plants, they just dehydrate and die, or go mouldy overnight, or the leaves just drop off. The ones I have left are the survivors and won’t require much winter care. I’ll be sticking them to the bathroom tiles with rubber suction cups until spring, that should keep them happy every time we have a shower they will get some moisture so I won’t need to spray them with water very often, if at all.

There are outside jobs to do as well before things get darker and colder. If you have a barbeque that might need to come indoors before it rusts to bits. Frost sensitive posts will need to come in and if there are any hanging baskets left dangling outside the front door, these might need taking down and composting too. I’ve tried to delay the inevitable with baskets some years but they have a tendency to just give up at this time of year and look very bedraggled. 

As it’s getting wetter the paths will need clearing and cleaning. I have a lot of overwintereing broccoli and after lifting it up today I found a lot of slippery slime on the concrete path. In summer having to walk off the path and onto the lawn to get places isn’t an inconvenience but when the large leaves are wet and droopy you get wet brushing past them and the grass can be very slippery so it’s a priority to keep access clear. It might be a week or two until we need to be up the ladders clearing the guttering of leaves but it’s worth keeping an eye on the downpipes to see they are flowing well. We’ll be collecting leaf mould very soon.

It might be an idea to prepare the tools for winter as well although you might still need a few of them for planting evergreens and hedges. There is always something to do in the garden and if this winter is anything like the last one, I’ll be cutting my grass once a week until next summer.