The hot spell we had a few weeks ago seems to have brought everything earlier than other years. This is possibly good or bad. We are about 6kg of tomatoes ahead of what we would have expected to pick by this time in an average year and it seems to be mainly down to the larger cultivars ripening earlier than usual.
One example is Marizol Gold. This usually crops around the first week of September but it is already providing us with largish tomatoes (about 500grams). There aren’t more tomatoes on the plant than I would normally expect so I can only assume that the season will be shorter.
The same is true with the apples. The water (Discovery) is an early cropping variety but we usually hold off starting to pick them until early to mid September. This year we have already started picking and eating them. They’re slightly underripe still but sweet and tasty. In a while they’ll go pink inside (assuming the wildlife leave them alone).
We’ve already made tomato sauce and soup as well as drying some apple slices to go with breakfast. Tomorrow it’s red tomato chutney which will use another kilo of tomatoes.
Whilst these are doing well, overall I think we’ll get less from the garden than normal. The strawberries didn’t do well, the raspberries are small and a bit dry and the courgettes have lost all the female flowers (although they are starting up again after the recent rain).
We’ll, that’s the fun of gardening 😀