I took down all sweetcorn to their breaking point and hacked up all the greenery for the compost bin. I put the lid on the far bin, which has been in use over the summer and opened up the one that’s just had grass clippings in it. They’d gone a bit anaerobic on me, so I tried to mix them up a bit with a fork. I’ll continue adding drier material to that one now.

The bean pole had fallen down again and it looked like something might have been digging in the dusty soil too. I left it on the ground all morning while I worked, figuring that would make it look like a deliberate choice. I started harvesting gourds according to their readiness and in the end took nearly all of them home. I’ve possibly left some of them longer than I should have, but any short-lived casualties will help me eliminate some of the huge range of choice!

There are lots of the bobbly pear shape I know from last year, but this year they’re bigger and even more warty. No doubt due in part to feeding them. The ones that are like bundt cake ones are lovely. While tidying up the gourd bed, I found a little red toad under one of the tiles as well as various eggs in the soil and a little blue caterpillar. Four little gourds are still growing, so I ended up taking up all the vines but those.

In the afternoon I finished clearing up the gourd vines and then moved on to the collapsed beans. I lifted up the grey bucket that had been “helping” to hold up the pole, but there was another toad underneath it, so put it straight back down again. How wonderful that the toads have stuck around. I guess they’ll enjoy the hiding places the plastic coverings offer again. I cut down and unwound all the runner bean vines – mostly in light rain, but that didn’t bother me wearing two layers. Before I put the post back up to “vertical”, I stepped backwards and tripped over it on the ground and landed on one of my orange buckets, breaking the sun-weakened rim … which was of course the bit where the handle went in, rendering the thing utterly useless, rather than just reduced in capacity.

I picked an apple to see how they’re coming along and took a bunch of cucamelons too. It was quite a car-load, with all the gourds too. There were 76 gourds in all, not including the 4 still growing and the 4 or 5 lost along the way. Yippee!