A Ghost In My Shed 👻 A Rat In My Garden! 🐀 Welcome October 🍂🍁
Hello everyone, I am still here and I am back. We have been away for a week on a family holiday, so this is a quick catch up on what has changed in the garden while we were gone. It is around two in the afternoon on a Wednesday in the middle of October, the sun is already sitting low, and you may hear the school next door in the background. That is just life here.
Outdoor tomatoes still going in October
I have to start with the tomatoes, because I am genuinely amazed by them. They are still lush and full of fruit, and it is all ripening nicely. Quite a lot has dropped to the ground, which is understandable after a week away. We left very early on a Saturday and came back late the following Saturday, and on the Friday before we went I picked most of the ripe ones. They just keep on producing.
On the other side, by the verbena, there is even more, and the top of the trellis is full of tomatoes. The Sungold plants have so many I have lost count. What shocks me most is that they have not caught blight. We are right in the middle of October and I honestly cannot remember having outdoor tomatoes at this point before. I think this is the best year my tomatoes have ever had. One stem is carrying so much weight that I keep expecting it to snap, but it is holding on, and there is even new growth, so I might just leave them for as long as they keep going.
The cucumbers are not quite done either
The cucumbers are tangled in between the tomato plants, and their leaves are wilting and rotting now, so they are clearly finishing. Even so, there is another huge Femspot hiding in there, and yet another one growing next to it. Back in September I picked a giant one and thought that would be the last of the big ones. Femspot, anyone?
The Merlins did well too. My husband picked a nice sized cucumber on Monday after we got back, and there is one more growing on top of the trellis. One plant is finished, and there was one cucumber I had completely forgotten about, which will have to go in the compost. Still, I am seriously impressed with how these plants have done so late in the season.
Brassicas and salads planted in a hurry
On the Friday before we flew out I decided, very last minute, to plant the salads and some of the brassicas into the ground. I did not think they would survive a week in pots, because I had no idea how much rain we would get. As it turned out there was quite a lot. A few purple sprouting broccoli are still waiting in pots, and I may put them in the corner where the pumpkin used to grow.
Three broccoli went where the courgette and the other cucumber had been, after I took down the two beefsteak tomatoes, which were finished. I tucked salads along one side and in between the parsnips, in the row where my salads grew at the start of the season. The parsnips need tidying, and they and the carrots are probably ready. The beetroots are at the back. My winter cabbages are in the border where the potatoes used to be.
Something has been eating the salad, and the slime trails tell me exactly who. Interestingly, the slugs clearly prefer the green leaves to the red ones. One fun thing to finish: tomato stems I left in their pots with no water at all, in very dry soil, are still alive and putting on new growth. Nothing will come of them now, but it is amazing how determined plants can be.
A ghost in my locked shed?
Something very strange happened in my shed while we were away. The night before we left, I put my pumpkins on a tray on the shelf, exactly as they are now. The window was blocked from the inside and the door was locked from the outside. We have a camera pointing at the garden, so no person got in. We came back in the dark and rain on Saturday, and on Sunday I only checked the garden for any damage.
Later that Sunday my husband went to the shed to get some onions from our stash and called me in. The tray was upside down on the floor with the pumpkins scattered everywhere, and he asked if I had left it like that. I definitely had not. The shelf is stable, there was no draught, and the neighbours' cats that roam the garden every night could not have got in.
My first thought was a rodent, maybe one that had chewed its way up through the floor. But none of the pumpkins or the pattypan squashes have any teeth or scratch marks, apart from one small dent that looks like it came from the fall. A rodent would surely have tried to eat them. So for now it remains a mystery, and please do not judge the end of season mess in there. I will sort it out once I know what is going on.
The big pumpkin and the pattypans came from the allotment, where I had so many more. I never made a proper allotment harvest video. At that point I did not really want to be there, so the three of us would go together, do a quick harvest and a bit of tidying, and head home. I shared another pumpkin of the same size and lots of the smaller ones with family, because there were far too many.
A rat on the lawn in broad daylight
Speaking of rodents, I definitely have a rat in my garden. Yesterday, shortly after midday, I was washing my hands at the kitchen sink, looked out of the window, and there it was, sitting in the middle of my lawn. The school was out to play, so it was noisy as always, and yet the rat was not bothered at all, not even when I opened the door. It was just poking around in the grass as if it was looking for worms.
I had time to fetch my phone and record it, and then it still had not moved, so I went back for my camera. I stayed on the decking. When it finally noticed me it froze for a few seconds, then turned and hopped away. It was so calm that I wondered if it was a rat at all, so I showed the footage to Google's Gemini, which said it was definitely a brown rat. It also suggested that a rat this relaxed probably lives in the garden, maybe with a family, and when it asked whether I had any food sources, my answer was basically that I have everything. A full garden is paradise for a rodent.
I ordered some traps straight away and I am waiting for them to arrive. I am not completely freaked out. Rats are part of nature and I think it is something we can handle, but it did cause a bit of mental discomfort. I do not think the rat got into the shed, though. It would have had to bite through solid wood, and it would certainly have tried to eat the pumpkins. It reminded me of the hole in the potato border when I was lifting my potatoes. I kept checking and saw no new tunnels, so I assumed it had moved on. Clearly it had not. I also need to clear all the fallen tomatoes, because they are only inviting the blooming rat to dine with me.
Clematis privacy, peppers and chillies
I still have not cut back the verbena, but I will. One thing I have noticed while working in this part of the kitchen garden is how much I like the bushy clematis on the arch. It gives me almost complete privacy from the neighbours' first floor windows, so I can potter about without feeling watched.
The bell peppers in pots are coming, but they are nowhere near ripe and I am not sure they will make it before the frost. Last year I grew them in pots of exactly the same size on the shelves in the shed, where the pumpkins are now. Those plants were half the height but had far more fruit, and by the end of September they were already bigger and ripening. You can see them in my very first video, the end of September garden tour I uploaded on 5 October. So next year I think the peppers go back in the shed. The chillies, at least, are turning red now, with a little dark purple still showing on some of them.
A seed parcel from Ali, and one year of the channel
Before I go, I have to show you the parcel that Ali from My Rusty Garden sent me. She is a star and an angel. It is absolutely packed with seeds, including a variety I have never grown before and some I had seen in her videos. Every packet has a label and a picture, and the amount of effort she put into it overwhelmed me. People like that do not come your way often. Thank you so much, Ali.
This channel is also officially one year old, which I can hardly believe. Thank you to everyone who has been with me this year. I am sorry I have not uploaded anything yet this October, right on our anniversary. There are things going on in the background at home that have taken priority, filming and editing take a lot of time, usually at night when everyone is asleep, and the shorter days leave less good light for recording. I will try to be more consistent again, because I have lots of ideas and plenty of work to do in the garden.
In this video
- Outdoor tomatoes still lush and blight free in mid October
- Another giant Femspot cucumber and more Merlins
- Salads, broccoli and winter cabbages planted before the holiday
- A pumpkin tray knocked over inside a locked shed
- A calm brown rat on the lawn in broad daylight
- Peppers slow in pots this year, chillies turning red
- A generous seed parcel from Ali at My Rusty Garden
That is enough of me chatting about where I have been. If you need new gloves for the season, my code AGA10 still gives you 10% off at CoolJobSafety, a US brand, so delivery to the UK takes a little longer. Now I would really love your help: how do you deal with rats in your garden? Anyone who grows food will get rats and mice at some point, so tell me which traps you use and whether there is anything that actually stops them coming back. I will see you very soon in the next one.
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