This week, we focus on ripening, harvesting, and getting some ‘greens big enough to provide us with something fresh and nutritious through the winter and into early spring. Keep an eye on our socials this week as we support you to make the seasonal switch to help you grow something through autumn and winter. Meantime here’s our weekly update for the growing week ahead.
If you’ve missed something, scroll through weekly updates or Grow6 crop pages to catch up.
Peas
Will be enjoying the rain and continuing to crop, though plants will be turning yellow. Once all the pods have finished, plants can be cut back to ground level and the tops cut up for compost. If you have seeds left, you can re-sow pea seeds on your windowsill to harvest pea shoots for salads and stir-fries.
Tomatoes
As our temperatures and daylight hours begin to feel autumnal, the focus turns to ripening fruit, so ‘stop’ the growth on cordon tomatoes (see Jossie from Lauriston Farm on our socials) and remove lower leaves to enable any sunlight to access the fruit. With bush and tumbling tomatoes, this is a bit trickier. However, any light pruning to enable more sun to reach the fruit at this stage is good. Familiarise yourself with signs of tomato blight and be vigilant; any unexplained brown growth or discoloured fruit should be removed instantly and not home composted.
Berries
Cut off strawberry runners from the mother plant– and either pot up or grow on these, young, small plants in open soil. Check autumn raspberry canes are upright and properly supported to ensure the fruit has access to as much late summer sun for ripening as possible.
Greens
It’s been a great year for growing greens and it’s time to keep growing them to provide for us through winter. It’s too late to sow outdoor greens to get through winter but young plugs can be settled into warm soils and grown on before the growing season ends. Do keep an eye when transplanting tasty young growth into warm, damp soils- slugs and snails love something fresh to eat.
Herbs
Late sowings of coriander can be made in pots indoors, parsley is slow to germinate and is better bought as a plug plant and then planted outdoors into open soil or pots.
Tatties
Continue the regular ‘blight’ watch as maincrop tatties swell in warm, wet soils. Once they have flowered and leaves begin to turn yellow from the bottom, you can dig them up . If you want to ‘store them’ in a cool, dark place, lifting is best done on a warm dry day to ensure the skins are dry.
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