I woke at the crack of dawn, dreaming of crunchy roast potatoes. Fortunately I didn’t have a stash of Kerr’s Pink in the flat or I think I would have been chomping away long before 5am.

Not one to delay gratification for too long, I waited for daylight and then headed down to the plot to source a roast dinner of monster proportions.

It was a bit too wet and claggy for doing anything awfully productive but I gathered up the wilting courgette plants and stuffed them into the compost bins with a load of decaying comfrey and then turned my attentions to the joyful task of harvesting.

I’m good at picking and may have got a little carried away considering I only have myself to feed - I suspect I may explode after tonights meal.

Not content with the bucket of winter roots, I thought I ought to try out the peculiar purple sprouts, I don’t want any nasty surprises at Christmas.

When I came to bag everything up, it became clear that I had at least a months worth of roasts in my sacks and so I split the bounty 3 ways to share with my neighbours.

Turned out to be a very profitable move as I ended up swapping one fine parsnip for a bottle of wine - a perfect kind of alchemy. I’ll be growing more of those next year!

Having received much advice of the paraffin/petrol variety, I thought I was assured a bonfire of truly gargantuan proportions.
I ran to the plot to escape a tortuous day of accounting boredom, and nipped into Homebase for supplies of accelerant and kindling.

On the plot, just shy of nightfall I thought I’d make some attempt at weeding, it was a bit dark and soggy though, so I could only manage a neat impersonation of a row of weeds. Thorough hand weeding is probably required at a later date.

I started by soaking one of my old and grotty race t-shirts in paraffin and them piling it with kindling and my driest specimens of blight infested tomatoes. With application of a handfull of lit matches, most of my dreams came true as the plot errupted into a fantastical show of light.

I was immediately concerned that I wouldn’t have enough fuel to feed this monster so started looking around for tinder. I admit to glancing at the shed but in the nick of time I remembered the trauma of the erection debacle and shifted my attention towards semi-combustable material left on discarded plots.

You may wish to substitute the phrase “semi-combustable material” with the word asbestos. No sooner had I built a sky-scraper of collected junk than the inferno sputtered it’s final breath. With a dead fire I found myself left with a pile of debris considerably taller than the one I’d started with. If I’d had any sense I would have returned the pitiful kindling back to the originating plots but instead I started splashing paraffin in a willy-nilly fashion and blowing on the embers until I became intoxicated.

Thank god it was dark, I was providing so much entertainment for the commuters on the adjacent railway platform that I can only be grateful that they would never recognise me again.

Here’s my share of their finds:

It’s a pack of 10 assorted yet edible Italian squashes. The seeds were packed together so there was hours of fun trying to identify 10 unique varieties. I could seperate 5 distinct seed types before bundling the remaining into a large nondescript pile. I still haven’t  a clue what any of the seeds are, I’m assuming that the large seeds give rise to the larger squash and maybe the bent seed is the crookneck squash but I suppose I could be completely wrong.

I’ve labelled them with the vague impression that I may treat this as an identification puzzle. There is a very slight possibility that I may label my sowings properly this year and eventually manage to marry seeds with fruit and then if the pigs fly, I might save the said seeds and be full of enlightenment this time next year.

Or not of course.

It was a bit of a struggle to find enough for photos for Septembers month in pictures. What a wash out it’s been. I’ve hardly made it to the plot at all this month.

I’ve started saving a few seeds and amazingly some of them have even dried out enough for storing. In the specimen jars I have poppy, blue mist, foxglove and sweet peas. The first two self seeded everywhere and almost all plot holders would call these weeds but I love them and can’t bring myself to yank them up when they blossom in the middle of my semi-pristine rows.

It’ll look like Flanders next year.

I was pretty determined not to run out of onions quite as quickly as I had this year but 1000 might be overkill. Much sucking of teeth and sharp intakes of breath followed as I wondered where they were all going to go. I could actually turn the entire plot over to onions at that rate but that was going to require a lot of digging. My big job just got a lot bigger, so I did the only thing that can be done under the circumstances. I opened a bottle of honey beer and had a little sit down to think.

Two bottles of waggledance later, the onions were still sitting there, so I gave one pack to my neighbour and reduced the challenge by a third. Success!

A couple of wonky rows went in before I started watering and was pleased to create my very own rainbow. Having the foot of the rainbow land in my Brussel Sprout patch must augur well for a bumper Christmas harvest, it didn’t unfortunately mark the site of a pot of gold.

There are a few similarities, I’m back to digging and I’m planting strawberries again, I’ve even got another pile of weeds forming but this summer it doesn’t look like the heap will ever dry out sufficiently to set it aflame.

The strawberry bed was a mass of tangles, strawberry runners twirled around bindweed stems and I felt it was time to have a clean up. I’m probably a little late actually but I’m sure they’ll be happier with some breathing room now. It also gave me chance to clear out the last remaining patch of bindweed hiding underneath the pond liner.

Here’s the yearly progress shot from the water butt - anticlockwise: Sept 07, Mar 08, Aug 08, Sept 08.

Despite the grotty wet weather, August still flourished and I spent almost all of my gardening time harvesting crops. Can’t complain about that but it does mean I failed to sow any overwintering crops, hopefully September sown spring cabbages will still be productive.

Blight inevitably struck towards the middle of the month so I pulled up all the spuds up and kept my fingers crossed for the health of the greenhouse tomatoes.

With the major crops out, and the blight spreading across the outdoor tomatoes the plot began to look a bit tatty towards the end of the month. Shame really but I suppose that’s the way with gardening, its time to start looking forward to the view of freshly turned soil.

A while ago I noticed reddish stains appearing on the tops of my pear leaves or at least one reddish stain on one pear leaf.

I humphed and pfftted a bit, but did nothing further. When my folks visited last weekend I sent them off to investigate and it seems that almost every leaf is now troubled and the underside has a peculiar spikey growth, reminiscent of an Ankylosaurus.

We picked it apart but didn’t find evidence of any juicy bugs.

Anyone know what it is?

The outdoor tomatoes have been decimated by blight but I haven’t dealt with them yet because I’m not sure what to do. Ideally I’d burn them but my arson skills are limited and I have a whopping great mound of blight invested potatoes haulms to deal with first.

I had a little helper on the plot today. He watered my spinach and kohl rabi and then emptied my sack of spuds as I tried to fill it. I boiled up a delightful cob of corn but he wasn’t interested and opted instead for a couple of yellow french beans and a load of shelled peas.

It feels great to share real food with little kids, so many people in cities haven’t a flipping clue where food comes from or what it looks like. This one now knows the joy of a freshly podded pea.

I think I wasted my time this morning lighting a new stick of patchouli and lemon incense. The mornings trip to the lotty resulted in a monstrous glut that could only mean an afternoon spent preparing chutney and a house oozing the homely charm of hot spicy vinegar.

There are a couple of cauliflowers in that shot but I’ve deliberately avoided a close up of them. I think cauliflowers are designed to be picked the moment you spot them, flush with their juvenile tight white heads. I was a little greedy and hoped for huge curds to rival my dads. I chopped a stray outer leaf off to protect from the sun and left for another couple of weeks to swell. Inevitably the severed leaf rotted and formed an ideal pied-a-terre for numerous detritivores which did their best to make me weep.

I’m not wasting them though, deep cleaning with a tooth brush and a heavy handed shave, left the heads in good enough nick to form the basis of a piccalilli chutney.

I’ve doctored the recipe from Greenforks who made a far more appealing looking sauce than me but then Waitrose had run out of turmeric powder - there has obviously been a run on piccalilli making.