Why Britain is in for a bountiful autumn It's a similar picture out there in the fields and orchards. Although spring was resolutely awful - cold, wet and seemingly interminable - the summer, when it did turn up, exceeded all expectations, meaning crops have been later but sweeter than normal. Britain's niche-but-growing apricots have graced the supermarket aisles with their biggest crop ever. Britain's wine industry is having a good year. A farm in Kent is even selling melons to Morrisons. Melons with a Union flag sticker? Whatever next? Strawberries have had a late but particularly triumphant summer. Rather fittingly for a company that makes preserves, Wilkins & Sons of Essex, which makes Tiptree jams, has had such a bountiful harvest of fruit that it has had to freeze some for next year. "It's been outstanding," says Chris Newenham, farm manager. It was very slow to get going, but the warmth has meant the fruit have been able to grow over the longest possible season and develop their flavours and sugars. Jars of its signature Little Scarlet jam, made from fragrant strawberries "the size of your little fingernail," will not be in short supply. Home growers, too, will be getting out their muslins to preserve gluts of berries, tomatoes and courgettes in jams, jellies and chutneys. Kilner reports rising sales of jars, and Le Parfait brought forward the launch of its "starter preserving kit" in expectation of Britain's bumper harvest. In the woods and hedgerows, too, it's a picture of plenty. It is looking like the most abundant wild harvest of haws, hips, blackberries and crab apples in years. This is thanks to what is called a "mast year," when woodland trees produce a particularly heavy crop of acorns, beech nuts, sweet chestnuts and conkers (collectively known as "mast"). The result of a complex mixture of natural tree cycles of productivity and the long, hot summer means that participants in the annual World Conker Championships will be spoilt for choice, and birds and other wildlife will be going into the winter fat and healthy. Not to mention the pigs, which will soon be set loose to forage in the New Forest over the annual pannage season that runs for 60 days. "We have a tremendous amount of acorns this year, so the pigs will be happy," says Sue Westwood, clerk to the Verderers of the New Forest, the organisation that regulates the turning out of pigs, donkeys, horses and cattle. Acorns are toxic to ponies and cattle but not pigs, so getting the pigs in first means they can clear the floor, getting nice and fat in the process. In London's Greenwich Park, assistant park manager Michael Loughnane won't have to rely on happy pigs to clear up the "abundant" crop of sweet chestnuts he's expecting this year after "exceptional spring flowering." Hordes of urban foragers - many from the Chinese community, which is particularly partial to a roasted chestnut - will soon make their annual visit, filling their plastic bags to bulging with the plump, sweet nuts and, hopefully, abiding by the polite signs in English and Mandarin not to bash the branches for the fruit. They might want to bring extra bags this year, and save some room for the ginkgo fruit that have ripened for the first time in the park's Flower Garden. Yet, according to the National Farmers" Union (NFU), Britain's agricultural harvest this year is not necessarily "bumper." We've become so used to walking around in shorts, and even, heavens, leaving out the sun-lounger cushions overnight, that we tend to forget we had one of the coldest, latest springs on record. Not only that, but an exceptionally cold, wet autumn last year. It has been a bad year for pears, for example, since they lay down their fruit buds a whole year before they mature, and last summer's gloom didn't suit them much. Wheat, too, has struggled. A lot of seed sown last autumn rotted in the wet so the wheat harvest is down on last year. But the fruit we do have tastes terrific. So gorge on British strawberries, raspberries, apples, blackcurrants, cherries and plums while you still can. "This year it's all about taste and flavour," says Dr Chris Hartfield, the NFU's horticultural adviser. We had a delayed start because of the cold spell, and we're expecting crop yields and size to be average, but thanks to the sunshine, sweetness levels are likely to be higher than usual and crops might go on later. We could see strawberries carrying on till the end of October. Stoked on late strawberries, melons and home-grown sweet potatoes, our shelves groaning with jars of jams and jellies, you can't help feeling we are a nation heading into autumn renewed, our vitamin levels nicely topped up for whatever winter has to throw at us. The birds will head into the cold spell plump and comfortable. The squirrels will be happy, the pigs fat with acorns. And there's another bonus, too - fewer people will be getting green-tomato chutney this Christmas.