Well, it's been pretty wet here for the last few days so I've not been able to get out to do much in the garden. Before the rain arrived I had got started on some tidying up jobs. Until the garage was built a few years ago we had a large oak barrel in which we collected rainwater from the roof. Since the garage has been built there is not enough room for it by the downpipe. It has been sat on the path ever since, occasionally with a container with flowers in it placed on the top to cheer the corner up. I noticed that the top was looking a bit rotten so I had the idea of taking out the top and letting the rainwater collect in it and then getting the water out by dipping the watering can in. I took a sledgehammer to the top and it came out quite easily. Having removed the top I could see quite alot of daylight through the gaps - more than would be closed by the wood swelling when it had water in it. So I decided to demolish the whole thing. My first thought was to give the wood to a friend for their wood burner but then Mark reminded me that Bonfire night is coming so we're saving it for then. The barrel was originally an old whiskey barrel so I'm hoping that an essence of that will remain and that the wood will burn fragrantly!

Mark's sister has given us two small standard olive trees. We haven't decided on the final position of them yet but at the moment they are either side of the path onto the patio. I will have to get some fleece to wrap around them and the pots to protect them from frost. We have a large standard olive in a half barrel just outside the back door. It gets some sun in the summer (at midsummer the drive which is aligned E/W gets the sun all day) but not enough most of the time. The arrival of the new plants has been the spur to do something about moving it to somewhere where it can get more sun. The only place we can really put it where it will get more light is up on the back terrace. This involves making space and moving the immoveable plant and container! There was a climbing rose on the back wall. It had attractive flowers but was very prone to blackspot and only bore flowers high up. So I have whipped that out and tidied up the bed it was in. The plan is to put the olive tree in front of this little bed. I will manure the soil before next summer and then decide what to plant around the olive. We have yet to actually move the olive. Rain stopped play. It is at least a one man + one woman job. We are going to have to get the tree out of the barrel and move barrel and tree separately. Not a job I am relishing!

I picked some baby spinach the other day. As it isn't growing quickly and there are no sign of the replacement carrot seeds coming up in the little trough I decided that it was too late to sow more spinach in the half barrel that the kenyan beans had been growing in. I put in some hyacinth bulbs instead. We can feed our sense of smell and sight rather than our bellies!

Well, the heavy rain at the end of last week finally did for the tomatoes remaining on plants outside. It was a double whammy. The extra water caused some fruits to split and the dampness brought out myriads of slugs and snails which gorged on them. So I rescued what I could and brought them in to finish ripening on the window sill or, if they were ripe and split, to cook them straight away.

So that's the end of the tomatoes. The kenyan beans are also finished. I have left the roots in the half barrel and am going to fork in some chicken manure pellets and try sowing some more spinach. I hope to do that in the next few days while the weather is fairly good. The runner beans are really over too and most of them I have taken down but two or three plants still had some baby beans which I couldn't bear to cut down. So now all we have left in the garden that's edible at the moment are the carrots in pots; the baby spinach (also in a pot) which is just about ready to pick the first few leaves and the courgettes in the ground which aren't doing much at present.

I have put in a few cauliflowers to overwinter. The one's I put in earlier in the year grew well but got attacked by beasties, pitted by the weather and I didn't get the hang of turning over the leaves to prevent discolouring (they kept popping open again) and apart from a couple most of the curds were inedible. I am hoping for better things this time around!

I mentioned previously that the carrots in one of the troughs had been chomped away. There were also some self-sown tagetes in the trough which were eaten and suprisingly they have shown signs of recovery. Not much sign of the carrots recovering though so I have sown more in the same trough.  

The rain also did for the gorgeous chrysanth in the pot. The dahlias seemed to stand up to the weather better but I think they could do with further tying up.

Along the retaining wall we have a lavender hedge. Usually at this time of year I remove the dead flower heads and then February/March time I cut back the plants quite hard. The plants have been there several years now and are getting quite woody so it's time to replace them. I have taken a load of cuttings from the existing plants and pushed them into a space in the garden. It's a little bit late for the cuttings but as we're on the south coast and it's quite mild I am hoping that enough of them want to root to enable me to replace the plants we currently have.

It's a tidying up the garden time of year. As some space has appeared with the end of the runner bean's and turnips I have been able to reposition my compost bins. For many years we had a couple of wooden slatted bins but when they rotted beyond use I aquired a plastic bin. I now have two of these and I have to say that I don't find them as good as the wooden ones. It is nearly impossible to turn the material in the bin. I've tried using a fork but you end up with bruised fingers. I recently bought a plastic contraption that you push into the compost to aerate it but I'm not impressed with that either. I also find that it is not very easy to get the compost out of the little access hole at the bottom. Hence the need to reposition the bins. I have now positioned them so that the access holes face directly out on to the vegetable plot to see if that works better. It does mean however that I will not be able to get compost out during peak growing time.

As I was in a tidying up mood I finally got around to dealing with the two remaining bags that I had been growing potatoes in earlier in the year. A couple of months ago the plants were begining to show signs of blight and so I removed all the foliage and destroyed it. As I didn't empty the compost soon after I was expecting that any tubers would have rotted away. So when I slit open the first of the bags I was delighted and suprised when beautiful, clean tubers emerged. The second bag had a fewer tubers but enough for a feed which was more than I had expected. Interestingly the bag with the smaller yield contained more soil based compost than the first but that may just be a coincidence.

I am pulling young carrots from the pots. They are really tasty and just need a rinse off before popping them into the pot. A few have a tiny bit of carrot fly damage. I think that the flies must have got in the last time that I thinned out.

I have planted some hyacinth bulbs in bowls for the house in the winter. I love their fragrance. I have placed the bowls in the dark in the garage and will check on them from time to time.