Autumn: when balmy breezes strengthen to chillier winds, hopefully bringing rain.

According to the weather report, that could be later this week. In the meantime, we haul water around the garden for the vegies each morning, and again in the evening for whatever needs it most.

Orchards in the region are harvesting their last luscious nectarines and peaches. I should buy up big for  jams and chutneys. But the last jar of plum chutney in the pantry, from 2007, and a solitary bottle of grape sauce, from 2004, remind me that it’s best to leave that sort of thing to those who are good at it.

Tangy white varieties of peaches and nectarines, my favourites, will be gone even sooner than the yellow ones. Their brief season makes them all the more desirable. With their end in sight, it’s a guilty pleasure to eat two in one sitting. Well, we don’t want them going soft now, do we?

In their place, there’ll be Fujis and Pink Ladies and all manner of pears.

A roadside tree not far from here – perhaps a remnant of a long-lost garden – offers apples to all who care to pick them.

A few years ago, the poor thing barely escaped an overzealous road crew on a grass-slashing job. Its recovery was nothing short of miraculous and while its apples are a little on the tart side, they’re fine for cooking.

On the weekend we sallied forth to pick basketsful of succulent blackberries from any number of bramble patches sprawling across the neighbourhood, only to find the ripest fruit already taken, probably by birds.

A second crop of bright red unripe berries has replaced them. Along with the feral apples, we’d planned to bake them in a crumble, served with an extravagance of cream. Oh well, perhaps next weekend.

For the first time since I planted it, the grapevine reaching up the wall of the big shed has produced fruit. It’s planted in a discarded, bottomless (no pun intended) dunny can that I found under the house.

After a friend gave us the vine a few years back, I dug a big hole near the shed’s entrance, where the morning sun is fierce, pushed the can into it and planted the vine. With chicken wire to climb, I doubt it could be happier.

It’s rewarding us with fruit that has an unusual musky flavour… nothing to do with the dunny can I hope.

Soon there’ll be chestnuts to gather, conveniently ripe when the weather turns cold enough to roast them, and mushrooms to pluck from their pine needle beds.

And hopefully there will be rain.