Picking battles

I am a believer in picking your battles. A person can expel an awful lot of energy fighting a battle they have little chance of winning.

I have come to the conclusion that I am not going to get one up on Squirrel at the moment, or anytime soon for that matter. His constant digging around and ransacking my beds has been driving me potty. I can see hm from my kitchen window, throughout the day, usually with a conker in his mouth.

There is no winning and so from now on I shall ignore his constant invasions, he's mostly just uprooting green manure and I can learn to live with that.

Tomato plants have been mostly lifted now and just need cutting up and bagged up in the council compost bags. I've cleared one bed completely.

All cleared and swept. The one part of the garden that looks tidy!

I've sown some broad beans, which I've not grown before and planted out some coriander and parsley along side some salad leaves. These I'm going to keep under cover and see what happens.

Around the outside I've sown two types of green manure so come the Spring I can dig the whole bed over and spread the nutrients throughout.

I've cleared out the tomato grow house.

I've also sown some broad beans here but mainly I'm hoping to bring on some cuttings. I took three cuttings of the rudbeckia and two new strawberry plants from runners. I'm hoping that the peppers might just ripen.

I'm going to try overwintering this jalapeno plant.

The idea of overwintering is that the plant is just bought indoors and should it survive, it will flower in the Spring meaning an earlier crop. From what I have read, jalapenos don't always survive but I'm going to give it a shot. It's had a feed and I shall leave it be.  My neighbour has a chili plant that I gave her last year, so it can work.

The rest of the garden still needs work, pots to empty and clean.

By chance, I found this cocoon hanging from some broccoli a few weeks ago and I kept an eye on it. On Wednesday, I looked at it and could see the wings had formed. Exciting!

I cut the leaf and we put it in this jar for Leah to take to school.

Some time between the end of school on Thursday and Friday morning, the butterfly emerged ready for all of Leah's class to see and then they set it free. I know to many gardeners, we committed one of the ultimate sins, all I can offer in my defence is that I 've scraped my fair share of eggs off leaves in the garden this season. Hope that goes some way to even things out a bit.

Somethings are harder to squidge than others.

The cosmos are still going strong.

The past week, whilst the weather was good, I took this photo with at least 6 bees and hover flies buzzing around collecting pollen.  It was great to see. Cosmos really are my favourite flower, at the moment.

Now it's time to batten down the hatches and dig out the water proofs.

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