What to harvest now

🌾🧑‍🌾Vegetables Last call for summer favourites: tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, and all squash (courgettes, pumpkins). You can still harvest all salads well into the season, before frost. Harvest the last of the runner beans, sweetcorn, and any remaining leeks and celery.

🍇Fruits: Continue harvesting apples, pears, and quince, plums, nuts. Figs are finishing so make jams to continue enjoying them for months.
🌿Harvest all herbs: Hardy herbs like rosemary, thyme, and sage can be harvested year-round. This is a good time to pot up some like parsley and chives for a winter windowsill supply.

💐 Flowers cuttings: While it’s the time of chrysanthemums and captivating dahlias, you can still find beautiful marigolds and some sunflowers. And meanwhile, oranges and lemon trees are rewarding us with their beautiful blossoms too.

What to sow or plant now

✏️If not done alread, order your seeds and bare-root fruit trees.

🌱Plant bare-root trees and shrubs: as plants go dormant, it’s an excellent time to plant new fruit trees, hedging, roses, and perennial shrubs.

🌱Now is a good time to transplant your trees. Check my video on how to transplant an olive tree!

🌸Plant your spring bulbs: tulips, daffodils, crocus, irises, allium for a vibrant spring display.

🌱 Last call to sow your winter season vegetables : onions, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, celeri, leeks. Sow spring onions now

🌱🧑‍🌾 For more information of what and when to sow indoors or outdoors, check our Seeds and Seasons Calendar for help 📆

To-do list

✔️ Consider saving seeds from your favorite vegetables and flowers for future planting

✔️ Continue monitoring plants for diseases, especially on tomatoes and other vulnerable crops, especially now that they are getting weaker

Sustainability actions

🐝 Collect and store rain water

🐝 Compost heap:: add healthy plant matter from your garden

🐝Collect seeds from your favourite plants and store them in a cool and dry place, in labelled envelopes, ready to sow in spring

🐝Get ready to plant some green manures. Green manures offer multiple benefits: they prevent soil erosion and nutrient leaching over winter, improve soil structure, and enrich the soil with nutrients when dug in. They also create a protective cover for beneficial insects like ground beetles and, if allowed to flower, are a source of nectar and attract pollinators like honeybee, bumble bee and hoverfly.

🐝Legume crops that have finished their harvest (beans, peas…) can be cut back, leave the roots in the soil to provide extra nitrogen for future crops.

🐝 Remember the vast majority of insects are good and biodiversity is key