Garden Journal - Harvesting the Greenhouse

Summer is definitely coming to an end here in the UK, with the weather cooling down and some serious storms over last weekend.

Actually, it's been a fairly cool and damp summer this year. I blame sun spots. The 11-year solar cycle peaks next year, but even this year we've had high sun spot activity. That reduces the sun's energy output, causing cooler and generally wetter weather.

Despite this, our greenhouse has done very well.

We've already harvested basil and coriander, and allowed some of the coriander to bolt so we can collect the seeds for next year. Now we're picking everything else from it.

Here's the first thing; a pair of red peppers. I was amazed how big they got, I thought they might grow to five or six inches long, but they actually turned out to be almost eight inches.

We also had a selection of other things - aubergines and different types of peppers...

Finally, a basket of peppers which were fully grown but hadn't totally ripened. They are still definitely useful for adding to curries !

This year was very much an experiment, planting a variety of different things to see which worked in our garden and which didn't. The peppers were definitely the big success story, while the aubergines did well but we lost a couple of plants that got too heavy and fell over. So next year we'll stake them up a lot better.

But once the peppers were cooked, we kept a bunch of the seeds. They dry quickly, and we can plant them next year once the weather is right. We'll be growing a lot more of them next time around, they are delicious - home grown food always tastes nicer than shop-bought stuff !