If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest… have a really dry year apparently… certainly some things on the smallholding have enjoyed it more than others… and not necessarily the things you might expect.

It’s a record-breaking year for our quince tree, which you certainly would expect, as the early spring blossom usually gets knocked off by spring showers. Expect your own body weight in membrillo for Christmas this year!

But harvesting our potatoes produced easily our biggest ever spud, weighing in at around 12 inches across. Now we’ve grown these Desiree potatoes before, and they are usually a good size, but we were expecting drought affected shrunken specimens this year for sure, not such a record-breaking monster.

And is if Roy Castle couldn’t get enough, our first puffball mushroom of the autumn was our biggest ever too, coming in at the size of my head! Certainly enough for several day’s breakfast running.