Well we have been delighted with the month of dry weather that finally arrived on our doorstep. It has actually made our outdoor working life as far as possible as close to perfect as you can get on a farm. Still loads of back-breaking hard work but it all seems better when the sun is shinning.  So the month of October surpasses even September for the bumper harvest that is going on. We are rapidly approaching the old pagan feast of Samhain and it is easy to see why they celebrated at this time of plenty.

There is no excuse at this time of year for buying any imported vegetable produce. Nearly every vegetable is available locally at this time of the year: Tomatoes in tasty red delicious abundance, peppers green, some red and yellow, and all the usual Irish suspects, turnips carrots and the whole range of roots. Onions in from the field and dried for winter storage.

It is hard to choose just one or two vegetables that symbolise the essence of October. So I have chosen a couple that are a little unusual. The first is Celery. Celery doesn’t thrive in the Irish climate but it does grow albeit slowly and the first outdoor grown celery can begin to be harvested at this time of the year. The taste and smell of freshly harvested celery is fantastic and they taste so much sweeter than their distant imported relatives.

And for my second choice, of course pumpkin and squash are a very common sight in October mostly for Halloween, but it's the Uchi Kuri squash that we grow primarily for its taste.