And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core!

... bit of the old Keats, as Autumn has arrived and we've got lots of mellow fruitfulness. 
The very warm summer, punctuated by the occasional day or two of heavy rain, has resulted in lots of very tasty and plumptious fruit. The blackberries are everywhere, very large and often hanging like bunches of grapes. Nollie has made batches of blackberry jam and we will be making syrup for putting on ice cream and yoghurty type things; and we will be making some blackberry vodka.    

Traditionally, one gathers the rose-hips (for syrup and jellies) and the sloes (we'll be making sloe vodka) after the first frost - so, we don't know when that might be, but there are certainly enough fruits to make a larder full of preserves.
As for tomatoes, there continues to be a huge crop:

- so, there has been lots of passata made, and chutneys, including tomato and courgette and, extra yummy, tomato and peach:  

And in the flowerbeds we still have a lot in bloom, but also many of the flowers have dried out into seed heads - so we are lightly digging the soil and rubbing off all the seeds into the turned soil .... takes a long time, but the results from doing this last year have been quite spectacular:

As for the wild flower pasture ... as we said, the results of the annual seeds have not been exactly impressive - it is because we planted quite late and then ran into the two month drought. But in the last couple of weeks there have been more cornflowers and daisies showing and we are now in the process of taking lots of seed heads from other wild flower areas in the garden and piling them on to the pasture ... and in a few weeks we will strim the whole area, spreading as many of the seeds as possible. Then, we hope that next year the perennial wild flower seeds will germinate fully, backed up with other annuals. That's the theory!