You visit the plot and it feels just like summer, if not a bit cooler, you cling onto the idea of summer for as long as you can. You visit the next time, it’s wet and there are leaves off the trees covering the plot. Within just days, summer really has ended and there is no way you can deny that autumn is now here. The shortening summer days really have turned into the long autumn days, finish off what you can as winter will be here any time soon.

I raked up a lot of the leaves, there will be a lot more over the next weeks to come. I thought it would be too wet and muddy to do any hoeing but it wasn’t too bad. The large bed with the manure beans needed hoeing between the rows. It seems slugs have eaten much of the spinach and chicory. I’m not surprised, September is a time of damp and slugs, these plants have no chance.

I pulled a lot of the turnips while they were still quite small, they can become way too large in just a week so you have to get them just at the right time. They bulk out cooking, if you cut them up small you never know you are eating turnips, they are a strange taste I think, but a useful vegetable all the same. I also started pulling a lot of the carrots, a bit misshaped and nibbled on but worth having. Annoyed with the caterpillars on the swede plants, I had to pull some off again although the numbers are a lot smaller. Still, they have eaten a lot of leaves and we are destined to have small swedes again this year. Next year, I’ll try again for something better.

I carried on with the project to lower the strawberry bed but the rain came too soon and so decided to call it a day.

I came home with:

• carrots
• turnips
• apples

Back at home, with all the tomatoes from the garden this month (around 5kg), after had had eaten a load, given a load away, we decided to make tomato sauce. It was quite pleasing to think the only thing we had to buy was celery, everything else we had either from the garden/allotment or our store cupboard. We did have a blender and so had to go out to buy that, which means we can now make breadcrumbs. Yesterday we made chicken nuggets, so much quicker when you can make your own breadcrumbs. The tomato sauce is good a ketchup but it’s also been nice as a pasta sauce, or adding a couple of spoonful to bolloti beans for homemade baked beans.