How Does Your Garden Grow - The garden's swan song

The last week has been BIG on pumpkins in the garden and the allotment.   Harvesting on the allotment; mostly potatoes, pumpkins, onions and beetroot.  There is spinach that will continue all through the winter, some leeks and onions, but, then that's it.

There was a surprise on the allotment.  I've no idea what this flower is, or where it has come from, it is in the scruff at the edge of the allotment.  Does anyone know what it is?

I have so enjoyed this linky, really, it is my favourite, and although I've not contributed every week I have read it every week.  So, a big "THANKS" to Mammasaurus for hosting, her beautiful photos, and my particular favourite 'Grandad's' beautiful veggie garden and all the other regulars whose gardens I have been inquisitively nosing around, "Thanks for sharing".  I am saying this as, with the weather proper cold this morning on the school run, I know there will be less and less to photograph in my garden and on the allotment.

We've been tidying and putting the garden to bed, cutting back our vine and roses.  Little Louis Fox took this shot of a rose on the weekend as we took the final blooms inside.

There are a few little flowers, like these cyclamen, still poking through in the slightly more sheltered areas of the garden.  I need to tidy my plants in pots into these sheltered corners, if they are going to survive the winter.

I really don't want to sound melancholy as I actually love the autumn.  The last foraging of blackberries.  Autumn walks with the dogs and children chasing leaves.  The colours of autumn.  Little Una Fox's veg art, that we are not allowed to move until she has taken 100 pictures.

One thing I really enjoy is preserving the last of the bounty from the garden. We make chutney, jam, pontack sauce, sloe and damson gin, freeze apples, blackberries, black currents and damsons, my kitchen is even more of a permanent mess than usual:

The last tomatoes ripening on the window sill, waiting to be turned into green tomato chutney.  The last, too far gone, blemished skinned, red tomatoes I roast with peppers, olive oil and chillis and make into my spicy passata.   I use it in chilli which we eat with corn muffins.  A friend with family in the US buys me Jiffy corn muffin mix.  It's the cheapest stuff going, probably not very wholesome, but I got a taste for it when I lived in the states.  It's great with really spicy slow cooked chilli.  And on that note I have made myself so hungry I have to go eat.