Autumn comes to the garden

In an ideal world, this would be a time of mellow fruitfulness. In my garden it's a time of powdery mildew.

Still, it hasn't harmed my squashes or courgettes.

My second-largest courgette was over 20 inches long and weighed more than my kitchen scales could handle. So I had to cut it in half to weigh it (I was about to chop it up for soup anyway). It turned out to weigh a total of 3.154 kg.

The green manure I put in the garden (plants you plant after crops have finished and before the next ones with the idea of improving the soil by digging them in before you plant your next crop) is coming up nicely and should provide more interest than I usually have in autumn and winter. I've planted it in the new bed that the sweet corn was previously in (the bed right at the front of the next photo) and also where there broad beans were, between the yellow flowering rocket and the runner beans.

I've also planted it around the pond in between the foxgloves and the honesty, where it's providing pretty feathery leaves and making me think I must buy some ferns for that end of the garden. The pond is weirdly unphotogenic. Every time I look at it, I think "wow, that's looking really good, I 'm so glad we put in a pond", but every time I try to display its full glory on a photo, it never looks as good as it does in real life. 

The pond has also been growing a new surface plant, which I believe to be duckweed. I'm in two minds about whether to try to remove it. It's supposed to be bad because it quickly covers the surface and starves the pond of light (but then, wasn't that what I was trying to do with the black dye?), and forums say different things about whether wildlife finds it beneficial or detrimental. Given that my pond's so small, I can always fish it out later if I change my mind (probably repeatedly, it sounds like it has that sort of persistence), but for now I'm going to hang onto it and see if more wildlife appears and if the other plants survive it.