Harvest

I have distinctly felt the first touch of autumn these last two days. Heavy rain chased away the warmer air, and now the sun is back, but we're into another phase.

A vase of flowers from the garden - the first sweet peas (at last), one white, one dark red, frothy alchemilla, a lovely mallow with darker purple veins on its pale lilac petals, penstemon, veronica, spikey petalled astrantia, and something with small dark red flowers I think is a godetia. They are all together in an old milk bottle marked Hornby & Clarke, which L dug up in our London garden years ago.

Still eating gooseberries, dark as plums, tender broad beans, sweet tasting 'early' potatoes whose skins insist on floating off as they cook, nutty flavoured bristly courgettes, strawberries, raspberries, lettuce and mizuna. The runner beans are flowering scarlet on the allotment as they scramble up their hazel wigwam. And we have seedlings of rocket and chard growing on in the cold frame for later crops.