Veg and print

It's the time of year when ripening veg invade the windowsills of our house and printmakers have to take second place!

The tomato plants all decided to get blight and 'Tomato Moths' at the same time and so we harvested the lot (a lot) and left the plants outside for the caterpillars to finish off!  This means that every space has trays of tomatoes of every shade between green and red and I really hope they all go red as we still have some of last years green tomato chutney in the cupboard...

...and the pepper plants got really bad greenfly all of a sudden - it must be an end of season thing - so you can just see the fruits lying on the windowsill getting redder by the day...

...and the squashes (my not so secret favourite thing to grow and then stockpile along with the logs ready for winter) are just having a final warm indoor ripening session before being stored away ready for winter feasts that will be needed in the far distant future.

Oh, and I made some prints too.  But really I'm more interested in the squashes and the stockpiling...

free food

This year a lot of plants have appeared in our garden and allotment that have self seeded.  Once I recognize what the seedling is trying to be I tend to just leave them to get on with it unless they are really in the way.  It's also really interesting to see when they naturally germinate, especially when compared with the ones I am trying to force to grow in little pots way out of season.

This year there was so much self seeding going on that I can only put it down to a complete lack of weeding meaning that everything was pretty well established before I got there.  We had five or six sunflowers in the garden, which had much bigger flowers than the ones we lovingly grew on a windowsill.  We now have five well established alpine strawberry plants which have fruited solidly for the whole summer and are still going now (the one in the swede patch is a little hard to get to, what with all the netting, but worth it for that taste).

And we have tomatoes.  Literally hundreds of cherry tomatoes, mainly yellow and mostly growing in what was the pea patch.  They are sweet and delicious and out performing everything in pots in the garden.  Now we are on a full tomato diet as they will end as soon as the weather turns and people are starting to complain about tomatoes with tomato sauce for dinner again...I love it because they taste great and are all free...

...so I have 'sun-dried' several trays full in the oven, put pints of yellow pasta sauce in the freezer and tonight we have made yellow tomato ketchup.

printing and vegetables

We've picked a lot of things from the allotment and garden because, quite frankly, the weather is rubbish.  A busy week or so ahead and pretty uninspiring weather forecasts have led us to believe that the veg would be better off at home, in the warm and dry, despite needing a little burst of sunshine to finish off ripening...

That means I have to share my printing space with hundreds of green tomatoes.

I feel a print coming on...