These are some sort of tomato relative, according to my husband, Joe, who bought them earlier in the year. Joe loves to grow things in pots – he is not particularly enthusiastic about the rest of the garden – but every year he celebrates summer with a collection of more or less exotic vegetables bought as small plants and grown on in pots. This has been a great year for chillis (most of our meals have been pretty hot and spicy as a result, to the dismay of the children). But it is always touch and go whether the other vegetables are going to ripen up in time before the sun gets too low in the sky to flood the patio with heat. I don’t think these tomato relatives are going to make it – there are lots of flowers but not many of these beautiful green paper lanterns in which, apparently, the fruit will grow. I move the pots around the patio during the day, trying to keep them in pools of sunlight, but the heat has already gone out of the sun.
It has been a successful year in the garden. There have been several frustrating years when there was no time to garden, and hard winters killed off half the plants, leaving some real thugs and a few local weeds to dominate. This year I’ve managed to teach some of the thugs some manners, have restocked some of the more delicate perennials, and seen off some of the more difficult weeds. I am drawing up plans to bring the rest of the thugs to heel over the winter, and I have a lovely stock of echinacea raised from seed to move into the gaps left in their ranks. For the next year or two it seems my gardening will have to be military in flavour, described by words like “decimation” and “campaign”, but I hope it will become more gentle and administrative eventually.
I am reading “The Morville Hours” by Kathryn Swift and am feeling very inspired, even if my garden is very small and not at all remarkable.