Today's harvest

Blue sweetpeas, sungold and marmande tomatoes and just two courgettes: the sum of my harvest today. The crops aren't actually that prolific this year, so far, but we are enjoying the potatoes and still have lots to dig up, plus there are already more cucumbers than we can eat, so we're giving them away whenever anyone calls! We've also eaten several servings of purple beans that sadly go green once immersed in boiling water, three runner beans(!) and some, but not lots, of mange toutes.

The gardening programmes and magazines all say that August is the month for sitting back and enjoying the fruits of your labours. Not so in our garden, it seems to me that the work just goes on and on and on and on......... The little downpours we've had recently have made everything including the weeds grow apace and everywhere I look I see thistles, ground elder, nettles and bindweed. Hopefully visitors who only see the garden every now and then don't see these things but rather the overall picture which is quite colourful. There are gaps now; having cut back the hardy geraniums there are spaces where they had been flopping over, so I'm going on the look out for something to fill these areas and am thinking of euphorbias. One of the Open Gardeners kindly gave me a cutting of the honey spurge, euphorbia melifera, and it does really well in their garden which, like ours, faces the sea on the escarpment. Fingers crossed ours flourishes and I'll soon be in the position to pass on cuttings from it myself.

The beautiful dark blue/mauve hibiscus in the garden near the house has started to bloom today - wonderful, but a presage of the end of the season I feel, as are the michaelmass daisies that have started to open on the hill. Hey ho, it's just a few weeks to Christmas!