Last harvest?

There were a few snow flurries today, and tonight the temperature is supposed to drop below freezing. I thought it best to pick most of the greenhouse crops. I love walking back to the kitchen with a container full of vegetables under each arm (although I do worry that I might be developing some sort of Demeter complex) and today I was sad that this might be the last time I do that this year.

There were a lot of green tomatoes, which may or may not ripen by the kitchen window. I blanched the spinach and froze it and the cayenne peppers. The aubergines/eggplants are destined for a moussaka that I'm planning to make for lunch on Tuesday. They've done really well this year. There were some Hungarian Hot Wax peppers too, which I've pickled. Here's a picture of those, (a special request from our neighbour, Elizabeth).

Mike and I were busy in the lower vegetable garden this morning, pulling out the old corn, sunflowers and squash plants and then adding chicken manure to the beds and tilling it in. In the process, we turned four smallish beds into two large ones, to give us more growing space and to reduce the amount of grass-cutting that's needed in the summer. I'm delighted with the way the chicken manure turned out - it's rotted down to a rich brown material which I hope will do wonders for the potatoes next year.

Manure is the only useful thing that the chickens are producing at the moment: the older ones are in a moulting phase and have stopped laying, while the younger ones have yet to start. The new feathers are starting to come through on the older hens, making them look rather piebald and scruffy:

I hope they all start laying again soon: we had to buy eggs this week for the first time in a year, which was most upsetting!