Autumn is finally here! Or, for Americans, Fall is finally here! (I like both terms, but being a Brit I stick with Autumn, even though I now reside in North Carolina.) I'm looking forward to the cooldown - we had a 90 F day just two days ago. Next week the temperatures will be low 80s, which would be scorchingly hot by British standards but cool by NC standards. The first thing I need to talk about is Hurricane Florence. North Carolina suffered a direct hit and crawled over the State. I got wind, though nothing much above 40 mph. The main problem was rain. Some towns on the coart received over 30" of rain. Blimey. In my area we got about 7.5". This caused me some problems. My pumpkins were already under attack from leaf mildrew, pickle worms and lots of other types of bug. The large amount of rain seemed to just about finish them off. Yeah, I'm disappointed but they're dug up and on the compost heap. Oh well.

As for my tomatoes, I harvested nearly all of them and put all the green ones into brown paper bags. This is an old trick that seems to help them ripen. Certainly seems to be helping mine. I've started preserving them; the method I'm using is freezing. I've repeatedly stated that I'm on a budget thinner than a super model on a diet and buying equipment to can/jar costs - gasp! - money. Freezing is a cheaper option and I have a chest freezer. This is the method I use: put the tomatoes into boiling water for 60-90 seconds, drain, put tomatoes into an ice bath. This stops the cooking process and helps split the skins for easy removal. Take the skins off, core and dice and place into ziplock bags, juice as well. Squeeze as much air as you can out of the bags - this stops freezer burn. Then freeze. They apparently keep their taste very well and, given I used tomatoes a lot in my cooking, it will be very useful having lots of frozen tomato in the freezer. The plants themselves pretty much survived Florence and are still producing fruit. Hopefully this will continue for a month or two.

As I said, the pumpkins were dug up, along with the remains of my other squashes and the bean plants. The beans were spectacularly prolific, I planted bush beans and picked beans daily. Lots in my freezer and they taste fantastic. Anyhow, I was left with a lot of space in my garden and I spent a couple of days weeding (groan) and recreating wide, raised beds that I've previously talked about. A lot of effort, yeah, a few painful ant bites (not as painful as the huge wasp stings the other week, those buggers mean business) but worth it as I looked as the freshly dug/raked earth ready for Autumn crops. I chose to plant carrots, beetroot and two types of turnip. All these crops will be okay if we get an early frost. I already have broccoli growing, the seedlings survived the rain and seem healthy. If the frost comes before they're ready I'll cover them up at night with tents of plastic or old towels. I should have enough time to harvest them before the weather turns cold, though.

With nice timing, there is a talk at my local library this thursday, the 27th September. Here's the description for the talk: Lauren Hill NC Cooperative Extension Agent for Cabarrus County will be sharing her love and knowledge for fall gardening. She will be covering tall fescue lawn information, canker worm prevention, and fall vegetable gardening.' The NC State Extension is an educational resource, they also have programmes on the Public Service television. Good stuff and I'm looking forward to the talk; I will be there with noteboom in hand. I'll blog after the talk and let you know how it went. Again, thanks for reading.

TTFN!