Harvest season

So I guess you're all wondering where we have been these past couple of months?! I started a summer job in the middle of July so with both of us working a full week we were not quite so up for spending our weekends tending to the garden.
It was also extremely hot and dry at the start of the summer so without an outside tap we struggled to water everything sufficiently and kind of lost heart a little. The rest of the summer, however, has been pretty wet for Norfolk's standards, futher dampening our desire to look after our crop.
As a result we let the garden do its own thing for a while leading to it becoming rather overgrown in places and not really knowing what kind of a crop we would get.

We (O.K, mostly Matt!) have spend this last weekend clearing the garden ready for the winter which does already seem to be on the way. We have ended up with quite a good harvest but I'm sure it could have been better if we had kept a more beady eye on things:
We dug up one of the three bags of potatoes which produced enough to fill an old sweet tin although they were quite small.
Most of the peppers had gone off but we managed to get a handfull before they turned which I used in a vegetable lasagne tonight.
The sweetcorn wasn't quite ready for picking so we only kept one cob but we'll remember for next year!
There was another bag of carrots which should keep us going for a few weeks.
We cut some of the spinach leaves but its a cut and grow plant so it should keep going for a while and also found a marrow growing off the last courgette plant.
We have pulled up the onions and hung them in the kitchen, they are quite small so either needed to be planted deeper or spaced further apart.
Finally we still have a squash plant which we should be able to pick soon and some brussel sprouts and more potatoes in the ground for the winter.

Looking back we can see that plants tended to grow better in the soil bed rather than the grow bags. We will also probably not do as many tomatoes next year as they went a little wild and became quite unmanageable once we stopped having time to keep an eye on new shoots. We have also kept the herb plants we bought as most of them are perennials and the fruit plants (strawberries and blueberries) as they should do better next year.

We probably won't do much over the winter as it gets bitterly cold here but planting will definitely resume in the spring!