Our Garden in September–Il Nostro Giardino in Settembre

 

The end of September and I have to admit that with the cooler nights and early mornings along with the temperatures only reaching low to mid twenties centigrade recently that Autumn is with us.

The advantage for the garden is that the cooler temperatures and the little bit of rain we have now had have meant that more colour is appearing.

The orto as far as vegetables are concerned is still not producing much apart from tomatoes which although coming to the end are still ripening. We have also planted some peas, spinach and salad plants which are already up and if the weather stays mild may well give us some crops soon.

As for the fruit well I am ashamed to see how much is going to waste, I will post a photo that shows just how much fruit is covering the ground in our garden at the moment! We have used apples and pears in everyway you can think of and will have plenty of bottled, frozen puree, jams, juice etc to see us through the winter. We have even managed to find a few people who were able to take some fruit but most of our neighbours and friends locally have more than enough of their own.

There are still more apples to harvest, if we want an apple to eat we just pick it off the tree, which is absolutely the best way to eat fruit, the same goes for the last of the figs. We are now eating another interesting fruit from a small tree in the garden that we have been told is edible by the neighbours, never seen it before moving here. The Jujube, also known as red date or Chinese date, I looked it up on Wikipedia - Jujube and discovered they are believed to alleviate stress. They are certainly tasty enough, they have a sweet almost apple like flavour and we have been eating them straight from the tree. I think now I have read this we had better harvest them.

This afternoon we are going to harvest more grapes as we have discovered that they make a tasty grape juice which freezes well and will be the perfect way of using them for us. We are not interested in producing our own homemade wine as we are gifted with more than we can use anyway from our neighbours. Also to be honest there is so much great wine available at reasonable cost we do not need to.

To repeat myself from last month we may not have had a productive season with vegetables but we have certainly made up for it with our fruit, which luckily we do eat a lot of, well over the recommended number of portions per day for a healthy diet.

It is time once again for me to share some of my favourite garden photos from the last month with you. I always have difficulty selecting just a few so the interested gardeners and photographers amongst you will find the full album on Flickr.  Our Garden in September

Here then is a selection of eighteen photographs from the month of September for you to enjoy.

 

Boundary is just this side of the wires.

Pampas Grass

Nicotania.

Ornamental Peppers

Cerinthe and Golden Rod

Rudbechia

Jujube as mentioned in the text above.

Seedhead

Olives

Apple

Tomatoes

Grapes

Persimmon

More Apples than we were able to cope with.

Rose

Cyclamen

Autumn Daffodil – Sternbergia Lutea

More photos can be found in my Flickr album Our Garden in September

This week as it happens to be Wednesday and these are outdoor photos I am participating for the first time in Outdoor Wednesday.

Welcome to ‘News From Italy’ to the other participants, thankyou for calling by.

http://asoutherndaydreamer.blogspot.com/