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October in your garden

Helen Penrose checks off the key jobs coming up in your garden

In your gardenThe harvest continues, but the year is tipping inexorably towards winter, and it’s the vagaries of the weather, rather than the profligacy of your crops, that will set the agenda this month. If that first frost hasn’t caught up with you yet, you may still have tender crops in the garden – but leaving them there much longer is only an option for gardeners with strong nerves. If you get an Indian summer, there’s plenty to enjoy in the garden; if not, the priorities are to get your crops indoors and make sure that your garden is set to withstand the winter.

Plan crop rotation

Sowing and planting

• In milder areas, hardy varieties of broad bean can go in in October or November; provide cloche protection if you think your area is borderline. With luck, you could be harvesting your first beans in May. In very favoured areas, you could also try an October sowing of hardy peas under a cloche, or a sowing of an ‘early’ carrot in a cold frame. In colder areas, the broad beans and peas can be started in pots next month for planting out in the spring – and the carrots can be sown in a large pot in the greenhouse.

• Overwintering (‘Japanese’) onion sets and autumn varieties of shallot can still be planted this month, and this is the key month for planting autumn varieties of garlic (see pages 6-10).

• It’s still worth making outdoor sowings of oriental greens and winter salads – as long as you live in the south and cover the rows with a cloche from the outset. Further north, make your sowings under cover.

• More in the magazine

Crop care

• Put cloches or cold frames over any salad plants that you are hoping to harvest through the autumn and into winter, and any crops of borderline hardiness that you want to overwinter for spring cropping. Hardier plants, like winter spinach, chard and some oriental greens, will survive without protection, but you’ll get more leaves to harvest, later into winter and earlier in spring, if you cover them.

• Cut down the tops of Jerusalem artichokes; leave an inch or two of stalk to mark the location of the tubers, which you can leave in the ground and dig as needed.

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October fruit

October fruit
= Harvest your apples and pears before the gales do it for you, and store the sound fruit in a single layer in a cool room or shed. Use the windfalls and damaged fruit for juice, wine or cider/perry, leaving any surplus for the birds.

= Put up grease bands by the end of October to prevent winter moths climbing the trunks of apple and pear trees.

= Grease-band any stakes too, as these provide just as good a route into the trees.

= Collect up any diseased fruit and foliage and bin or burn it. Only compost it if you are sure that your compost heap is hot enough to destroy fungal spores.

= More in the magazine


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