Still life with fruit and vegetables

 

All homegrown/allotment grown, September 2025

Still eating our apple a day (and salad a day with no end to the lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers yet)--I'm currently experimenting with low carb apple desserts, such as an apple "pie" this weekend with a coconut shortbread top crust (no bottom crust).  We bought a low carb sweetener which is a blend of stevia and erythritol;  I've been using it every Sunday for a special fruit dessert, usually a fruit crumble using ground almonds instead of flour.  The plum crumble was especially good;  though the harvest was small and mostly out of reach, I was able to pick enough to make it on two consecutive Sundays.  No sweetener needed in the fruit, it tasted almost like cherry pie filling:  delicious.  

There are still some Sparta apples left on the tree but the Laxton Fortune is now completely cleared.  It's a surprisingly good harvest this year.  The apples pictured are the very last of the Laxton Fortune.

Not quite so successful for the runner beans though;  I decided to try them again after a hiatus and will probably put them on the back burner again.  Not productive enough:  lots of vines, fairly good flowering, but not enough turned into beans.  I think they need a cooler, wetter summer than we've been getting.  I have French bean seeds which hopefully aren't too old to germinate next year;  these have been much more reliable in a hot summer, and do well in a cool one too.

Although my harvest has been acceptable, it was not a zucchini summer again (though it was a cherry tomato summer!  The son has already made some excellent tomato sauce to go on his homemade pizza).  The above photo shows a massive marrow from someone else's allotment;  the giver said to me, "want a courgette?" and I said, "I never say no," and then he came out with this monstrosity!  I said, "are you sure that's a courgette?" (because in my book that is definitely a marrow).  It's still on my countertop, biding its time.  My own reasonably sized actual zucchinis (aka courgettes) came in at a modest one or two a week from each of about a dozen plants, most of which are now completely finished.  There's still a patty pan making little fruits but I'm going to pull it up anyway, as it's cold and rainy and nearly equinox.  I need a space to plant out my spring cabbages.

And I think we finally got to the end of the season's figs, two of which are pictured with the apples above.  A lot went into the dehydrator, and a lot got eaten.  I don't really know what to do with them otherwise;  I gave some away, but most people around here aren't familiar with figs--I had to teach the recipient how to peel them to eat (but they were well received after tasting).