With Autumn well and truly on its way it’s almost time to take stock of the past season and reflect on the highs and lows, what we could have done better, what worked well and what didn’t.

Especially as it’s been a very tricky season, heatwaves followed by thunder storms with heavy rain.

I have been growing newer varieties of my favourite flower, Dahlia, including Gateshead Festival, Blyton Softer Gleam and Polventon Kristobel.

And I am really pleased they have gown really well and done exceptionally well at shows.

I know showing isn’t for everyone and that’s fine.

But if you enjoy gardening and want to be inspired and learn more there is no better place.

They are like a live gardeners question time with so much knowledge in one place and everyone (well most people) happy to share their knowledge.

I have particularly enjoyed talking carrots this year, as back in March I started experimenting with growing long carrots.

Up until this year I had grown the shorter ‘stump rooted’ sweet candle carrot, but I wanted to go big. Don’t get me wrong a 12 inch carrot is great – but when it comes to carrots that’s very ‘average.’

And I wanted twice that size.

So I am pleased to say the bigger carrots have done really well this year, not only on the show bench but on the dinner table too.

I will definitely be growing the same variety next year.

What has not done so well for me this year is runner beans.

I’m not sure if I started them off too early, but they certainly did not like the hot weather.

I have quite an exposed plot, so they caught the sun all day, every day, and despite ensuring they had lots of water, they have ‘bean’ a disaster this year!

So I need to have a think about what to do next year.

A couple of ideas are a heavy mulch or to plant through weed suppressant membrane to help retain the moisture.

I’ll let you know what I decide to do.

It’s time to start tidying up at the allotment and thinking about winter jobs.

This year I am planning to replace all the timber around the beds. For the smaller beds I use pallet collars which are brilliant.

One of my fellow allotmenteers is an engineer and his firm gets hundreds of pallets that are just binned, so he has kindly brought me 30.

As for the bigger beds, of which I have 10, I am going to be getting cedar sourced and milled locally; the amount of timber soon stacks up though as each bed is 4.2m x1.5m which is just over 11m of timber per bed!

I think cedar will last well – I hope so anyway as its going to cost a small fortune!

The tomatoes in the greenhouse are coming to an end now as are the cucumbers, it’s been a great year for these and only growing two varieties of each has worked well.

Keeping things simple, such as only growing two varieties, has been something that I have tried to do this year and will continue through to next and the coming years, why make life difficult for yourself?

And if you want more light hearted gardening entertainment why not listen to the Shine Radio podcast Growing Together with yours truly and Claire Vennis of the volunteer run radio station – it’s good fun and sometimes even quite informative..

To catch the podcasts, visit the website at https://shineradio.uk/growingtogether