green tomato bounty

September has snuck up on me and smacked me in the face with it's arrival. Tuesday, our boy starts back for his last year of preschool. A good thing. He's been a bit bored with daycare during August - he's missing his friends and needs some more structure and challenge to his days. And the earlier onset of darkness makes bedtime a bit less of a nightly tussle. But, my garden isn't ready for it to be September. Our late onset of summer has slowed things on the vegetable front. Everything has been slow and late this summer. By the end of July last year I was bringing handfuls of tomatoes in from the garden. This year my bush beans have just started to produce now. I have gobs of tomatoes but they are all still green with only a couple starting the slow colour change to red.

Being a relative newbie to gardening this has me worried. I thought it was me but lately conversations with other gardener's are all about green tomatoes. I printed out a few recipes the other day - for green tomato relish, fried green tomatoes and green tomato mincemeat. Just in case. My sister-in-law is talking to her tomatoes, begging them to change colour. Even the market vendors today were talking about green tomatoes. We are all hoping for a great September - so our green tomato bounty has a chance for red greatness. So this post by Willi made me laugh. But I'm going to be going back to check for recipes. In between going out into my garden, and whispering to my tomatoes - come on, turn.

the garden today

We had a quiet day around the house. I spent a lot of the day puttering around the garden. I collected all the lavender flowers for drying. I found some green tomatoes - finally!

A few zucchini were almost ready for dinner.

And T and dug for potatoes - well, I dug for some this morning

 and T joined me later and found a couple more. I'm also getting beans (from T's garden)

 and chard.

There were some new sweet peas

and the sunflowers are blooming.

The roses are going strong as well.