September is also a time to harvest as much as possible.  I am lucky that I live in a community where any surplus fruit or vegetables we share with our neighbors.  From my own vegetable garden we continue to pick tomatoes, cucumbers, beet root, peppers, zucchinis and potatoes.  We are just starting to pick the runner beans. They always taste so much better fresh from the garden.  Before we went away I was able to pick a number of peaches and those that we did not eat fresh, we have put in the freezer.   Even though we had peach curl earlier in the year we still had an abundance of fruit.  I am very reluctant to use sprays as they have such harmful chemicals.

From my neighbor’s garden I picked a large batch of plums yesterday.  It was a little nerve racking as I spotted a patch of bear droppings so I know that the bears are not far off and I was fighting the wasps off while I was picking.   I didn’t really have time to make jam as we were trying to make the most of the weather spending time on the lake.  I just halved the plums, pitted them and then placed them in the freezer individually on trays.  I have now popped them in freezer bags and when I am in the mood for baking, I can make a plum crumble or plum upside down cake.  

Pretty soon I will be harvesting the remains of the tomatoes and will freeze them too.  They are great later on for pasta sauces and in soups/stocks.  

As the hanging baskets start dying down I always contemplate each year whether to try and salvage some of the more hardy annuals, i.e. the geraniums and fushchias.  I usually overwinter them in our garage by the window (which is slightly heated in the winter time) along with tender perennials, i.e. some of the water plants – the umbrella palm and the scarlet river lily, plus some of my ornamental small grasses and there is some alstromeria (Peruvian Lily) in a pot which I have managed to keep for a couple of years now.  It is hit and miss sometimes whether they all survive and then I get quite discouraged when in the spring you see the prices on some of these plants and you wonder whether it is all worth it.   However,  I do get some satisfaction out of trying to keep some of my favorite plants.     

I almost forgot to mention our grape vines over the trellis in the outdoor eating area.  When we first moved in there were a number of old vines on the trellis that we decided in the end to take out.  We replaced them with table grape vines and this year we are starting to reap the benefits of the fruit.  The grapes are a little tart at the moment, but in a few weeks they will taste just fine.