Late Summer bounty

I've recently written a lot about harvests from my Courtmoor Avenue plot, but my main focus is always on my own home garden. Since it is literally on my doorstep I am able to tend to it - and enjoy it - much more easily, and much more often. If you're in a hurry, you can sometimes miss things like this, a tiny Cyclamen:

This little chap is a volunteer. It just appeared spontaneously in the shingle of my garden. I potted it up and it now happily reappears each year, slowly getting bigger.

Now that the weather has turned a bit cooler, my Runner beans have finally started to produce a worthwhile harvest. Up till now I have only been able to pick the odd few beans here and there, saving them up until we had a viable quantity with which to make a meal, but yesterday I managed to find this lot (450g) all at once! Woohoo!

The plants are covered with flowers again, and this time it looks as if they are setting, so maybe I'll end up with a decent harvest after all. I just need the frosts to stay away for another month at least!

This week I harvested some more of my "Nantes" carrots.

They wouldn't win any prizes for uniformity, but they look (and taste) nice nonetheless - and most importantly they show no sign of Carrot Root Fly infestation, so the Enviromesh has done its job well again.

I'm still picking tomatoes every day. The small ones have just about finished now, but the big ones are ripening "in droves". This "Dwarf Caitydid" plant has produced comparatively few fruits, but they are huge and heavy and I have had difficulty keeping it upright.

Most of the chillis are ripening now, like this "Fish" one, changing from stripy green-and-white to orange and then to red.

My "Hungarian Hot Wax" plant only set four fruits, but they are nice and big. As their colour moves from pale yellowish-green, through orange to red, their heat increases (though they never get blisteringly hot).

Two of them were used yesterday in a Chinese-style Beef and Black bean dish, in lieu of the more normal Red Pepper, and very nice they were too.

I've got a fridge full of cucumbers at present (7 or 8, I think), so I think I can afford not to pick the last few fruits on the plants. They don't look very appealing, and probably contain more seed than flesh.

So, as you can see, there is still lots of veg coming out of my garden. As you know, flowers tend to take second place in my garden and I'm not so good at ensuring that I always have a fine display. One flowering plant that I do love though, is this one - Rudbeckia "Goldsturm" - which I think often looks most appealing when it is beginning to fade, and some of the petals turn russet-brown...sort of "shabby-chic".