Reaching the end - Who is left?

The season has definitely started to reach it's end here in our garden. Most of our beds are empty now, with their previous inhabitants either harvested or casualty of some pest. Apart from our butter-nuts mentioned in the previous post, here is a bit of a run through:

Our heart shaped bed raging with ripening
tomatoes and healthy beetroot.

Firstly, our heart-shaped bed is now the only one that has some real activity taking place. As we mentioned before, we planted 6 tomato plants and six beetroot plants in it and I have to say they are all flourishing. After our first attempt at tomatoes failed miserably, we decided to give it another go. 

Our first batch of tomato plants fell victim to what I believe was Gray Leaf Spot disease. Even though the plants got big and many tomatoes started forming, their production soon stopped and the leaves all started going brown. Eventually we lost all of them and didn't get a single tomato from them. I haven't really found much regarding the treatment of this disease, so if anyone has a remedy, please share!

The new plants have been most giving with their fruit and we've had a steady supply of incredibly delicious tomatoes coming from them. 

The cucumber plants have been pulled out - They were probably the most giving in the whole garden. We ended up giving some of them away as we just had too many! Our sunflowers all turned out great.. Some much more than others. They were actually good indicators of where the best sun in the garden is, seeing as we planted them all over. Some got very tall and others stayed short and small.

Some of the taller sunflowers from the garden.

Our little sunflowers on the left - not the sunniest
of spots in the garden.

Our watermelons also took a dive from the same wilt that claimed one of our cucumber plants. Makes sense seeing as watermelon plants are also vines. To avoid it, they say one should rotate crops each year, plant disease-resistant varieties, and sow radishes in your melon patch - which apparently they deter cucumber beetles, which transmit the disease.

The Zucchini plants delivered a few enormous fruits! That's just before the powdery-mildew got them and now they too are over.. 

Currently, our gardening is still continuing though - we've still got our pepino melon plant and the spearmint along with my newly-found interest in making cuttings, which I'll post on soon.

Britney and Pepe

Our last visit to the nursery also saw to the arrival of two new perennial plants - a spearmint plant, who Saya named Britney, and a pepino melon plant, which I dubbed Pepe. We planted Britney into a fairly shallow but wide pot right next to the tomato patch. We mixed a lot of compost with some of our clay-soil. Pepe found his way into a tall-rectangular-shaped pot, right by the watermelon patch's entrance. The pot has a lot of decorating potential seeing as it has flat, large sides.

Our spearmint on the left and our Pepino melon on the right.

Besides the amazing smell of spearmint, I am told it has quite a lot of uses, ranging from medicinal to food-related. Here's a link to a site with a lot of uses and information for this special herb. The Pepino melon I chose because it already has it's first melon and because I'd never before seen one of these plants - although I'm told the fruit is delicious.!