Cavolo Nero, a handful of cherry tomatoes and a few beetroot (and herbs and stored garlic) is all that’s currently available for eating from the garden. We ate the last of our potatoes last week (between bags, pots and a raised bed, we grew about four months-worth), and finished the green beans too.

Other than garlic we’ve had nothing to store, last year we had surplus tomatoes that we used to make relish, but this year’s crop has been a bit of a saga and otherwise our garden is too small to produce food on a storing scale.

On the tomato front, the one cherry plant that was producing is winding down now, and most of the fruit is splitting at the early stages of ripening. But, somewhat shockingly, the fruit on one of the plants we had written off, but not yet condemned to the compost heap, has started to change colour after months of being frozen at a passive, solid green.

We’ve started our over-winter planting now. Putting down 100 onions (Senshyu variety) sets this week and forty garlic cloves (Marco variety).

Our cabbage and winter greens seedlings are developing and our broad beans are starting to sprout in the glasshouse (we want them all to be good sized and hardy before transplanting out for the winter).

But for now we’ll just be eating kale, beetroot and garlic surprise.