Saturday was a day that somehow got left off summer and found itself slipped into a batch of cold-and-wet late-autumn ones. It was warm and bright, and I celebrated by snoozing in the hammock for what surely must be the last time this year, and picking the last of the tomatoes before pulling up the now-withered plants and putting them in the compost.

We even had lunch outside, polishing off a dish of Kentish cob nuts my sister gave us from her tree in – you guessed it – Kent. They are wonderful – milky, slightly sweet and crunchy. I looked in the Nigel Slater cookbook (Kitchen Diaries – the best cook book I have) and found a recipe for Cob Nut Salad, which involved chopping them into a bowl, adding finely sliced celery and crumbling cheese over them. He recommends Ticklemore, but the Wensleydale we had to hand worked well.

The bare black earth where the tomatoes stood looks like an opportunity. I will try my own garlic again. I’ve had one success and three pretty miserable failures from garlic. One year it rotted, another the squirrels took every clove but not, as I later discovered, to eat. They redistributed them all around the garden, giving me garlic in the most unlikely and inappropriate places.

I know my soil is too heavy really, but my one successful year urges me to try again – that and the fact that even Waitrose’s Truly Bloody Expensive brand of garlic sprouts within a week or two of purchase. My own garlic lasted a year without sprouting, which suggests that the stuff we buy in the shops is already in late middle age.

I took a stroll round the farmer’s market after lunch, noting with satisfaction that my free cob nuts cost £3.80 a kilo there.

It’s one of the joys of the market as the season progresses – to check how much my own produce would cost if I had to buy it. To see, for example, that my artichokes – of which I had gathered 15 that morning - were £1.20 each, and that tomatoes on the vine were £5 for a measly punnet. I must have £100 worth in my freezer – and that’s just the ones that even with all my ingenuity and greediness I haven’t yet been able to use, but which I can thaw to a deliciously fresh tomato sauce right into winter.

The farmers’ markets take us Londoners for mugs. We were buying meat one day, and when we asked the rosy hued yokel selling us the brisket how we should cook it he said: “Don’t ask me. I eat in the pub.”