There’s probably a lot of poems out there about the gradual fade of summer into the lazy warm days and cool nights that signal the start of autumn, so I’m not about to add to the literary ruckus, but from about early February settles in is the start of my favourite unnamed season. When the forests are filled with Meadow Argus butterflies, white cockatoos congregate in flocks along the river line and the first blackberries glisten purple.
It’s a calm, settled time. Steadily productive without overwhelm and with lots of seasonal produce to enjoy. The liminal space between the resting breath of late summer and the first leaf fall of early autumn, into autumn proper when the first light (hopefully unmolested by moths) woollens emerge from the closet, to the first fire of the season, and before the first frosts start in earnest.
In my garden, the tomatoes are in full swing. As this is my first year of greenhouse growing, I’m taking a lot of notes including what varieties do the best in the close-confines planting layout, which are easiest to maintain, and which are the biggest bang for their buck. There has been one clear winners this year – the Italian heritage variety Periforme d’Abruzzo, Some of the smaller multi-branches types have been hard to manage and I think I’ll stick to growing them outdoors next season, while others have been ok but will stay on my favourites list regardless (including oxhearts and Paul Robeson). I’ve also been keeping a running weigh-in and am up to 30kg so far! No stress about not having enough tomato puree in the pantry for the next year.
After a slow start, the courgettes are finally getting their act together, although I could probably do without another glut as there’s still courgette pickles on the shelf from three years ago that I haven’t managed to get through yet. Climbing beans have been similarly slow but with my freezer almost at maximum capacity I think I can just stick with my glut of dried beans this year (no idea how I’m going to deal with my blackberry supplies yet, we’re gunna need a bigger boat etc).
Now that the flowers have largely died off, it was also finally time to harvest my elephant garlic. Although it’s a much milder form of garlic (actually a type of leek), I love that the flowers get to be a part of the garden until they’re spent (unlike their garlic cousins). They attract a huge number of bees and look so delightful in amongst the other vegies. Elephant garlic cloves can be pricey and hard to come by and it’s taken me almost 8 years to build up a crop of around 20 plants from the three cloves I started with. I love to pop a couple of cloves into my garlic roaster whenever I’ve got an oven roast on (yep, garlic roasters are a thing, and they’re great! Just another tip shop novelty discovery). The thornless blackberry is starting to get ripe fruit (although their wild cousins are still a little way off) and towards the end of the month I got my long awaited nectarine crop (they all got blown off in some nasty weather last season so I’ve gone a year without nectarine preserves).
This is also when the garden tidy starts in earnest. Chopping, pruning, mulching and composting. Everything starts to look a little more orderly, beds are topped up with the compost that’s broken down over spring and summer, and crops for late autumn and winter are starting to go in the ground. This month it’s been leeks, parsley, cabbage, kale, parsnip, carrots, beetroot and borlotti beans. There’s a little more time to start planning for the coming autumn tasks – rebuilding old beds, building new ones, setting up any garden flights of fancy that I’ve thought about over summer but not had the time to get to.
My pantry is filling up by degrees. Rows of preserved fruit, tomatoes, jams, pickles, potatoes, nuts, dried herbs, fruit and legumes gradually replace a collection of empty jars (this is definitely the year I finally do a clear out of leftover jars…definitely).
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