"No, thank you," friends would say after a three-second pretence of considering their current cucumber status. "I think we're right for cucumbers" – meaning they still have a dozen left from the last lot we gave them. Even the chooks began to turn their beaks up at cucumbers.

But now it's autumn and I've been saladless for about a month and suddenly feeling a bit cucumberish again. And there they are, still one every two or three days, a small miracle of cucumbers.

Have we accidently bred a cold-resistant cucumber? Or is it its position, near the water tank, protected by the salvias? Though at least two others were nearer the tank than this one. I'll let you know the answer in a year or six, after we've saved the seeds from this one and discovered if their progeny also keep fruiting long after others have faded into thin brown strings.

Theoretically each plant in the garden should be like others of its type. Most fruit trees are grafted from bits of others, meaning they are virtually clones, varying only by how they are grown. Seed is collected from virtually identical plants. But every so often something weird happens, and you get something very different indeed – or just different enough so that, like our vigorous cucumber vine, it looks exactly like its siblings until heat or cold or drought or a wet season means the others die, but this one lives or even thrives.

This is where having a "gardener's eye makes a real difference. Good gardeners notice plants that flower more, are hardier or more delicious, and breed from them. Or sometimes it just happens by accident.

Twelve years ago I planted a packet of single dahlia seed. They headed upwards, bloomed unspectacularly and then we pulled them all out, labelling the crop a minor disappointment. But one of the thin petalled blooms had been a deep, vivid red and somehow it must have been pollinated by one of the double dahlias in our garden. The resultant seed may have been blown by wind or scattered by birds, because next year a good vigorous bush emerged beneath our bedroom, where no dahlia had grown before, a sturdy bush bearing loads of deep red double blooms, unlike any we had here before and better than any other I've seen. (I've since given several of its offshoots to other eager gardeners, so it may well have spread far and wide by now.)

It should have been the result of years of dedicated breeding. Instead it was complete luck. It may even not have come from our dahlia's seed at all, but one transferred in another visiting gardener's socks – socks are an excellent way to transfer seeds, both flowers' and weeds'. Try germinating a pair after a good bushwalk. But those single dahlias did produce a few other chance seedlings too – so one of them probably was a parent of the red delight.

Mostly though the "new" plants in our garden have been deliberately bred – the cold-tolerant red tamarillos bred from crossing more cold-tolerant small orange ones with fat red ones till finally we got big reds that not only survived winter but fruited in the cold months too. The"Wedding Day" avocado that fruits when no other varieties are ready, with thin skin and small stones and oil-rich flesh came from carefully pollinating flowers of different varieties with a hairbrush, over and over, generation after generation, and growing the results till finally we got, well, OK, luckier than we had any right to be, as none of the "parents" fruited at that time. I was breeding for cold and drought-resistance, not timing.

And I still bless all the breeders who created my favourite fruit and flowers: Lady Williams apples that fruit later than their ancestor granny smith – herself a lucky accident that grew from a rotten French Crab that was thrown into a gully at the back of apple seller "Granny" Smith's house. Wandin Glory apple – one of the most heat and drought-hardy apples I know – was grown at Australia's Wandin Research Station. The Souvenir de la Malmaison rose I was given for my birthday because I love the flesh-coloured, "quartered", deeply scented rose, was bred at the Malmaison rose garden in France. And Papa Meilland, deep red and with possibly the richest fragrance of any I know, was bred by the French Meilland family of rose growers, who also grew one of the world's most popular roses, Peace, originally named after Madame Meilland, who gathered wild briar seeds to keep as rose stock during the years of France's occupation in World War I while the men of the family were away, so that when they returned there's be stock for them to graft the roses onto. But at the end of World War II the name was changed not to Victory but to Peace.

I'd grow Peace roses again if the local possums didn't love them more than any other rose I've known. I don't know if other possums prefer Peace too – arguing with each other all night then helping themselves to a good feed of Peace afterwards.

Peace was the result of careful breeding – I suspect peace usually is. But – if you keep looking – you too may find a small garden miracle, a new flower, or a lettuce that stays soft and sweet no matter how hot and dry the summer. Or even – a gift for gardeners across Australian gardens – a rose that possums refuse to eat. And even deer and rabbits and other rose munchers too.

* finally remembering to feed the silverbeet, so that it will feed us all winter;

* picking the new flush of grape leaves for stuffing – the grapevines lost their leaves a fortnight ago but the warm spell and the rain have brought in a bright flush of tiny, tender new leaves;

* wondering if I can leave the last of the pumpkins to keep maturing on the vine or will a frost suddenly freeze them so they start to rot;

* digging up the first of the Jerusalem artichokes to bake: sweet and nutty and low calorie as long as you only eat a few of them, too many and your housemates may place pegs on their noses or complain about the pong;

* admiring the indoor coffee bush that suddenly has too many berries on it to count – we may even get a week's worth of coffee from this crop, instead of a weak couple of cups; and

* planning a round possum guard to stop the possum eating the new Souvenir de la Malmaison shoots. They are tall and lush now, but once winter begins to bite the possum who lives above my study ceiling may start looking lustfully at the rose shoots. A couple of rounds of metal or even wide plastic around the top and bottom pergola poles will stop him climbing over them and getting at the rose shoots, at least until the bush is so big and prolific that a bit of possum nibbling doesn't matter …

These came from an accident too. I fell for some round savoury biscuits in Bologna, then wondered what else could be done with a similar technique.

125g butter
⅔ cup brown sugar
1¾ cups plain flour
1 egg
1 cup dark choc chips
½ cup dried apricots – softish ones, not too hard, but don't soak them to make them soft.
½ cup flaked almonds

Blend the choc chips and apricots. If you don't have a blender chop, chop and chop till they are tiny pieces. Now mix in the almond flakes.

Cream butter and sugar, add the egg, mix well, then stir in the flour.

Take a level tablespoon of mixture, roll into a ball with your fingers then press flat against your palm and roll it around a chuck of the chocolate fruit mix. There needs to be a reasonable thickness around the mix or it will ooze out when you cook it, so try to keep it even. Place each roll on a greased baking tray or one lined with baking paper.

Repeat till all the mix is gone.

Bake at 200C for 10 minutes or till the tops are slightly browned. Take out of the oven and cool on the tray – they'll be brittle till cooled.

Store in a sealed container for up to a fortnight. If the apricots are preservative-free – rare, unless you make your own – keep the container in the fridge.

When you bite into these the caramel should almost but not quite ooze.

The biscuit mix as above

1 x 395g can condensed milk
1 tbsp butter
2 tbsp brown sugar

Place the condensed milk, butter and sugar in a saucepan on the lowest heat possible. Stir with a flat-ended wooden spoon – bits may stick if you use a round-ended one – until the mix turns from creamy white to mid-brown. Do keep stirring – it is very easy to get burnt bits stuck to the base of the pan. Now leave till cool. It should be thick enough now to spoon out without it running off the spoon.

Place a spoonful in the middle of each biscuit, as above. Don't try to flatten them, or some of the biscuit layer may become too thin and the caramel will ooze out. Structural integrity is essential. Now bake as above, again till they are pale brown on top and once again, too, leave on the tray till cool. Store in a sealed container for up to a fortnight.