The mornings are already getting lighter and yet my head still hasn’t made the transition to the new gardening year.  Despite the over-wintered broad beans having broken through some weeks ago, I’m still mulling over last year’s successes and failures.  I need to work this through before doing battle with the 2012 seed catalogues.

I don’t like watering my vegetables, so as every allotment holder knows prolonged periods without rain can be problematic.  The fennel never really got beyond spring onion size (although it was still crisp and fragrant) and the cucumbers never outgrew their gerkin cousins.  And the extraordinary sunny spell in the autumn ripened the squashes to the point where only a meat cleaver could break through the concrete skin.  I realise though that the Indian summer was a blip and can’t expect the same weather pattern this year. 

There are some vegetables though whose performance doesn’t seem to depend on the weather.  For years leeks have been my sure-fire crop; low maintenance and a guaranteed winter of tree trunk like stems.  But for my last three years the leeks have suffered from rust, which has splattered them with pustules and drained them of their strength.  Each year I have put my faith in manure and crop rotation to keep my beds in tip top health, but this doesn’t seem to cut it for leeks.  Rust seems to thrive on nitrogen, so this year I’m going to try leeks in the most depleted bed and see if that helps.

Thankfully though whenever there are losers there are also winners.  Last year was the best I can remember for tomatoes (our freezer still has a few loose snooker ball reds knocking about) and we had a bumper crop of courgettes.  That being said, of the four courgette plants, the great F1 defender was responsible for the lions share yet again and the quality was superb.  Much though I love quirky heritage vegetables and the chanciness of germinating open-pollinated seeds, this year I’m going to limit myself to two F1 hybrid courgettes, Defender and probably Gold Rush.

Don’t get me wrong.  Consistency is well down the list of qualities I seek from my veg and generally I’m not an F1er.  I grow frisee lettuce and endive with a shockingly low yield, but the pleasure I get from being able to prepare a late autumn salad makes it a shoe-in every year.  And my brassicas are invariably outshone by the veg display at the market.  But for me its not a competition, it’s a passion.  When I finally get round to opening my seed catalogues this weekend I know my pulse will start racing.  I know that some seeds will disappoint but I also know that some will blow me away.  And that’s the thrill.

I so much enjoy the birds that come into our garden.  They bring colour, noise, charm.  The garden would be empty without them.

Garden birds are invariably timid though, so the best way of coaxing them to settle where we can see them is with bird feeders and water.  This is also good for the birds of course, so it’s a win win.

However, as is increasingly the case with so many of life’s pleasures, its no longer as simple as ‘feed the birds’.  With the rise of diseases like trichomoniasis it may mean using your bird feeder less.  The RSPB advice is to clean bird feeders frequently and if you see any sick birds (lethargic, fluffed up feathers, esp greenfinches) then remove the feeders for a while so that the healthy birds aren’t congregating with the infected birds.  A couple of weeks should be fine.

At least as important though is to make your garden as naturally bird friendly as possible.  The choice of plants, the design of the garden and the way you maintain it can make a huge difference to the bird life.  The best bird gardens have readily available water and a wide range of food all year (seed heads for finches, undergrowth for dunnocks and rotting wood for great tits and other hole nesting birds).  And herbaceous plants are not cut back until late winter, which means at this time of year seed heads like Phlomis look stunning.

Nothing beats a good murmuration on a Sunday afternoon in November.  And that’s precisely what we got at the RSPB’s Otmoor Reserve this weekend.  The signs were not good.  The expert twitchers were shaking their heads as if maybe the mild weather was a bad omen.  But thankfully all was well.  Soon after 4pm successive clouds of black specks soared and dipped in the distance before dancing their way to the reed beds in front of us.  At the last second they briefly soared before diving for a roost, as if the music had stopped suddenly in musical chairs (this blurry photo).  Come to think of it, how do they all find a space?

There has been a chain of letters in the Guardian this month on this year’s exceptionally long season for strawberries.  We picked our last strawberries this weekend, and whilst they had lost some of their firmness, they still had that lovely home grown sweetness.  We have blueberries too waiting to be picked, apparently unbothered by the first frosts.  And yet my radicchio that should be such a treat now has taken one look at the cold and shrivelled up into a brown ball of mush. 

I guess growing your own veg would be dull if every season was predictable and every crop consistent.  The next challenge will be the snow.  Stocking up with rock salt and waxing the runners on your toboggan may seem premature, but these days who can tell.  Maybe its best to keep the barbeque and hammock out too.

Harvesting your home grown fruit and veg is a pleasure, there is no two ways about it.  It makes you feel proud and wholesome.  But it is also a challenge.  Just as a farmer needs to keep one eye on his ripening crops and the other on the weather forecast, so too does the allotment holder and vegetable gardener.  This autumn’s overshoots have included:

- The katy apples we pressed to make apple juice, even though they were picked straight from the tree, would have been tastier and juicier two weeks early.  They looked lovely and bright red on the outside, but they had started to become puffy, which made the juice dull brown instead of lively pink.

- I was too greedy with my caulies, leaving them to grow just that little bit larger.  I then forgot about them for a couple of days and bang the lovely white crispness and had been replaced by leggy yellow.

- And don't get me started on the borlotti beans.  I wait all year for these as they are still not sold locally.  We had a couple of very good borlotti meals, but I was hoping for a couple more.  Usually blackened pods is not a problem, but this year they had gone too far even to be dried.

Thankfully I seem to have got my timing better on the tomatoes and courgettes, both of which are still producing well.  Ratatouille again tonight then.

All summer our garden has been buzzing with bumblebees, but there have been very few honey bees.  Now the situation has been reversed.  The recent cold mornings have killed off all but the mated young queen bumblebees which will be bedding down for the winter on their own.  For the honey bees though September is an important harvest time.  Supplies of pollen and nectar are needed to sustain the colony through the winter months.  A late feast on our sedum and verbena bonariensis could make the difference between life and death for the colony.

And they need all the help they can get.  Last winter was a bad one for honey bees despite the cold January and early spring which should have been favourable.  According to the British Beekeepers Association there was a 13% decline.

I don’t know why the honey bees steered clear of our garden in the summer.  Presumably there was more on offer nearer home, but its nice to feel we are doing our bit now.  Next year I hope we will have plenty of honey bees all year round.  From our own top bar beehive.

This is our very own cat’s ear.  It is the latest wild flower that I have identified in our wild flower meadow.  Its flower is like a small dandelion, but its stem is longer and thinner so it sways even in a light wind.

The good news is that it is an important food for many insects and farmland birds, such as linnets, and its scrawny rocket like leaves are good in salads, tasting less bitter than its close relative the dandelion.  However, it can spread and displace other plants so I will need to keep it in check.  Thankfully we have some sheep visiting soon for an early autumn graze and apparently they are very partial to cat’s ear shoots. Much like us then.

Everyone this autumn seems to have surplus fruit.  We have had one bough down on our katy apple tree as I wasn’t quick enough to unburden it, and the pear and plum trees have been just a laden.  For a couple of our espalier pear trees I removed 75% of the fruit a couple of months ago and this has really paid dividends.  We have had our best pears ever.  Note to self for next summer.

So what to do with it all?
Plums don’t store well, so my approach is to eat plums every day until you can’t bear the sight of another plum (until next summer).  I’m not mad on plum jam, but the River Cottage plum chutney is a winner for any plums you can’t face eating.

Pears don’t store well either so they are best left on the tree and picked as you need them.  I find it best to bring them indoors when they are still hard and to ripen them for a couple of days.  Beware though as pears have a nasty trick of rotting from the inside out, so don’t let a healthy exterior fool you.

Apples are much more versatile.  Cookers can be stored through to the spring as long as you have a dry, frost free apple store.  Cookers and eaters can be crushed to make apple juice.  All you need is an apple crusher and an apple press.  If you have too much juice, it can be frozen (or given to thirsty friends).  A nice problem to have.

This is yarrow, or achillea.  It is the first wild flower I have catalogued in my latest project, which is to create a wild flower meadow.  Over the next ten years (yes, I really did say 10 years!), I am planning to return our recently acquired field back to a natural, wild flower habitat.  I say return, but in truth I only know for sure what the field has been used for since 1995, which is cattle grazing and silage/hay.  Having said that, ridge and furrow is still evident, so it is likely that the field was ploughed in the Middle Ages (which created the ridges and furrows) and has not been ploughed for at least 100 years (otherwise the ridges would have been flattened).  So I think I can reasonably assume that the field was a hay meadow in the past, with a much richer flora and fauna.

Its not the cattle and hay making that has depleted the wild flower stock, but the annual application of nitrogen rich fertilisers.  The fertilizers have helped the grass, which has smothered the wild flowers.  Yarrow, hogweed and buttercup seem to be the only survivors.

So my plan is very simple.  I want to reduce the soil’s fertility to give wild flowers a fighting chance.  If I continually deplete the soil, through grazing and cutting/removing the grass without adding any fertilizer, the grass should start to suffer and the wild flowers should start making a comeback as should the wildlife.  Watch this space.

Over the years we have had all sorts of visitors to our office, mostly birds and bees.  This week we had a new visitor, a lovely peacock butterfly.  They are not unusual, but when I did our big butterfly count last week I couldn’t see one and this is only the second I have seen this summer.  And the commas which were so common a couple of summers ago have all but vanished.  It has not been a good summer for butterflies in our garden.

It has been a good year for bumblebees though.  Each summer we seem to have more and more.  When I walk into the garage I now make a point of keeping my mouth closed as they have a nest in the floor and like flying at mouth height!  They also like exploring our office, so I have a little papier mache bowl handy which combines nicely with our catalogue to make a  bumblebee catcher.  Maybe we should try a bumblebee nester in the office.