Who fancies a spot of family gardening this autumn? Madeleine Cardozo shares some green-fingered tips with Country Child.

The temperatures are dropping and growth is slowing down, but there are still some things that we can do in the garden to prolong the flowers and keep ourselves active outside.

The weather is still very dry so don’t give up yet on watering your plants, especially the ones in pots. If you deadhead your flowers such as roses, antirrhinums, lupins, sweet peas, they may still reproduce a few more flowers.

If some of your dead heads are looking nice and dry you can collect the seeds from them to sow next spring. I often go to other peoples gardens and see flowers that I want for my own garden and collect them, like different lavenders, hollyhocks, delphiniums…..

I cleared away a nice spot in the greenhouse the other day in order to sow some coriander and lettuce seeds only to find that the chicken thought that this was an extremely comfy new armchair that I had made her! So I have sown the seeds into some recycled plastic ‘seed trays’ and will move them on in a few weeks…

Madeleine Cardozo started market gardening at the age of 14 on her parents farm in France, harvesting asparagus and gherkins.

She then went on to study cookery, worked for major banks in London and feeding film casts and crew on movie sets.

Madeleine then married Damian and they had six children, this took up a little time.

Eventually things career wise began to take shape, cooking,  photography and gardening are her passions.

Madeleine has written three books, Down to Earth – an easy guide to growing your own vegetables, Plot to Pot, recipes using home grown fruit and vegetables and most recently Fire in the Kitchen a mouth-watering cookbook for teenagers.