After a wet day to start the month the rest of the week has been reasonably dry. Although the daytime temperatures have been around average for early November, we’ve had a couple of chilly nights with the temperature falling to 1.1°C or 34.0°F around dawn on Friday morning.

Our summerhouse is still pretty well stocked with produce harvested at the allotment over summer. We still have a variety of apples, a few pears, lots of onions, and a couple of varieties of squashes. With no heating in the summerhouse storing some produce over winter can be a bit tricky.

Normally our Crown Prince squashes spend all winter in the summerhouse and unless we get some exceptionally frosty nights they’ll keep okay. I will cover them with a few layers of fleece for additional protection sometime this month.

This is the first time we’ve grown Pink Banana. We have already used one Pink Banana and it tasted okay. I’m hoping that if we treat these in the same way as Crown Prince they’ll survive winter too. It’s a test of the overwintering ability of this variety.

However, it’s a completely different proposition regarding our apples and pears. There’s no way these will keep over winter. Some are already starting to rot.

I think this is an apple but it could easily be an Invincible pear. Any rotting fruit is regularly removed to stop it from contaminating adjacent fruits.

I’m hoping that our apples and pears will manage to survive through November by which time we should have eaten our way through most of them. As conditions turn colder and damper in the summerhouse they’ll start to deteriorate very quickly. We picked our first eating apples in the middle of August and with a little bit of luck, they will keep us supplied to the end of November. 

That’s of course assuming we don’t get any unseasonable cold weather.