Seed saving

Saving seed to use next year is fun and it means you can grow plants and crops for free next season! 

We have let quite a few of our flowers and vegetable plants 'go to seed' so that we can collect the seeds in envelopes to use next year.

We collected artichoke heads....  

...runner bean seeds....

....and lots of flower seed heads like these sunflowers.

Then we counted the seeds and put them in envelopes. We drew pictures on the envelopes and added their names, along with instructions on when to plant them. 

Salsa time!

It's harvest time and we had a good look around the garden to see how the plants and tress were looking.  Our new orchard is doing well - some of the heritage apple trees we planted last year are already bearing fruit! 

We picked some overripe tomatoes and some apples as well as some herbs from the new herb beds we planted up in the spring. We took some garlic that had been drying in the potting shed over the summer. 

We cut up the tomatoes and whizzed them up with some onion and garlic in a food processor, to make a fresh tomato salsa. Then we added the fresh herbs. 

We used three different herbs - chives, oregano and savoury. They all smelled and tasted different. We put some in each batch of salsa. In one of them we added a little bit of chilli - some of us like our salsa hot!   

Then we got some crackers and had a big tasting session before writing down the recipe in our gardening diaries. Yummy!