It’s been a productive season in The Other White House garden.

We’ve had more tomatoes than we’ve ever had before – red, orange, yellow, striped, cherry, plum and beefsteak (a selection is pictured below and includes a few chillies). One tomato plant, rescued from the DIY centre chuck-out for 50p, is currently laden with 20 slowly-ripening plum tomatoes. We’re hoping the weather stays the right side of blight for the next couple of weeks, and we get to enjoy these fabulous fruits stress-free.

We decided to leave our globe artichokes to the bees this year – and boy, do they enjoy them, which is more than can be said for Mat and the small person, neither of whom are particularly enamoured with the taste nor the time it takes to prepare these purple-tufted relatives of the thistle.

Our first batch of regular and sugar snap peas barely made it into the kitchen; grazed straight from the garden after school or whilst watering early evening (no hosepipe ban in the end). Holidays got in the way of a second planting, but a planned winter sowing of Aquadulce rewarded us with broad bean hummus not that long after the snow melted!

Two crops have been rubbish this year: climbing beans and potatoes, and we’re putting it down to the effects of the cold spring and super-hot summer. Our French and Borlotti didn’t even get going and although our first earlies produced a crop, it was limited in both number and size. We didn’t bother with a second and had to buy a bag of supermarket potatoes for the first time in ages.

This week we carried out the annual raid of the plum trees on the other side of the road, which are laden with yellow and purple fruits, and we are planning to turn our haul into jam and dipping sauce. The hedgerow is usually dotted with cherry plums, but not this year. Again, down to the weather? Next come the apples – there’s already been a bag of neighbourhood windfalls up for grabs, and then sloes …

We’ve blogged before about how being better connected to your food seems to help with valuing it more and there really is nothing nice than growing your own, whether vegetable or animal.

Our bantams are in the process of sprouting a new set of feathers, which takes it out of them a bit and stops them laying (again – see The Broody Bunch). But with a bit of luck, there will be a couple of weeks of two-eggs-a-day before they quit for the winter.

Last year, Audrey laid her first egg of the year on the last day of January – proving there’s always something to look forward to, even February!