Harvesting the veg and fruit

We've harvested a lot of our remaining produce now, it's in boxes in the utility room.  We asked in the supermarket if we could have some of their fruit and veg boxes, they were happy to let us have several.  Although it's still been sunny the past few days, and is forecast to be so at least today and tomorrow, the evenings and nights are distinctly cooler and the plants don't like it.  So I now have several boxes full of dessert and cooking apples, tomatoes - mostly green but some rapidly turning red, French beans, courgettes and butternut squashes to deal with.

The squashes will be fine, they last for weeks, months even, we grow them every year and they last pretty much through the winter in the cool utility room.

I've done another large jar of the pickled green tomatoes, in a few days I'll do a 3rd, so we can eat them in date order.  We haven't opened the first jar yet, but will do probably next week.  

The apples which are bruised or damaged I'm either peeling, chopping and freezing as is, or making apple sauce for the freezer.  Yesterday I did a slow cooker full of spiced apple butter.  We had some with thick cream last night, delicious, you don't need much as it tastes so rich.  I shall be using some to fill a sponge cake tomorrow (we're having guests round), the rest will be put in jars - one in the fridge and the others frozen.  

The French beans we'd left to grow big, deliberately - no use for eating whole, but I'm going to pod them all and cook the beans on their own.  There aren't loads but certainly enough to give us 2 or 3 meals.

The courgettes have slowed down considerably the past couple of weeks, so we only have about a dozen left, they'll be eaten over the next week.  We'll be harvesting the last bag of our new potatoes today too.  We still have plenty of carrots in the ground, tomatoes in the polytunnel (we picked all the outside ones), a few baby corn cobs, and lots of leeks which will see us through winter.

After our very wet and cold Spring and all our veg being started off very late, we didn't expect to have such a good harvest, it's been pretty magnificent actually, which we're so pleased about.