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It suddenly feels like summer is gone! The days are shorter almost overnight and there's that autumnal nip in the air of a morning, which is making me think that my summer harvests are going to start drawing to a close very quickly. There was even a

brilliant year for sloes, many of them the size of damsons and looking seriously juicy. I'm about to go out and start the harvest, sure to come back with arms ripped to shreds by those mega-thorns, as no doubt I'll forget to take the gauntlet gloves. I have

's still September! We harvested the last of the chillies and pulled these final few pak choi for Sunday lunch and patted Paul on the back, marvelling at the creativity of his construction. Wonder what else we could grow in it!

berries to harvest. They are so darned prickly that I'm convinced it wasn't brambles surrounding the castle where Sleeping Beauty slept, but gooseberry bushes.But after the successes of my currants last summer I have relented, and three gooseberry bushes

I am ashamed to admit that I still haven't got all my garlic in. I know the experts say I should have planted it in October or November, but I got a bit distracted by the apple harvest from a neighbour's garden, and spent all my time making jam

and provide a lovely, springy, dry surface to walk on. This means I don't need to don my wellies if I've just nipped up to harvest a few vegetables for lunch.You can't top dress beds with fresh wood chips as they leach nitrogen from the soil during

produced flower buds and the purple-sprouting broccoli which was cropping fabulously only a couple of weeks ago has gone to flower.It seems only a couple of weeks ago that I was harvesting tight clusters of purple-sprouting for the steamer but almost

I've been madly planting brassicas as if they're going out of fashion. Perhaps Brussels sprouts have never actually been in fashion - but they are with me. I greatly missed harvesting my own sprouts for Christmas lunch.This year, to make sure I don

, brought into the warm and protected environment of my greenhouse to ripen in time for Wimbledon. When I came to harvest them, bowl in hand, the fruits were gone.Now it's the blackberries, which are just starting to ripen and will hopefully provide rich

I admit that we don't get up to the allotment as often as we should, but does that mean someone else can harvest the strawberries in our absence? I think not. Apart from the rhubarb, and the perennial potatoes that keep appearing, the strawberries