GARDENING: August can provide garden sweetener

BY JOYCE RUSSELL

SOME fruits and vegetables have been slower to ripen this year. It’s almost always a case of how much sunshine we get and this also affects the sweetness of ripening fruits. A few bright sunny days can bring a massive change and August should see plenty of ripe sweet blueberries, tomatoes, peppers and more.

In contrast, some plants in the flower border are blooming earlier than usual. The occasional touch of autumn in the air may have spurred them on. There isn’t a problem with any of this if we can just relax and enjoy the bounty whenever it arrives.

Tomato care

Pick tomatoes daily as they ripen. If you have grown several plants, then there will be lots of delicious tomatoes to eat fresh or make into sauces, chutneys and so on. If you can’t deal with a glut at the moment, then open freeze tomatoes on trays before bagging them up. They will store for months in the freezer and can easily be tipped out of the bags as you are ready to use them.

Small varieties can be frozen whole; larger varieties should be cut into halves or quarters before freezing.

Take a good look at each plant while you are harvesting. If you catch problems quickly and take action, then you can keep plants cropping well for many months.

• Aim to keep the soil evenly watered. Fruit is more likely to split if you alternate between dry soil and over wetting.
• Avoid spraying water on foliage. Dry leaves suffer fewer mould problems than wet ones.
• Remove any leaves and fruits that show signs of blight, or even a whole plant if it is badly affected. This removes spores and helps to protect other plants.
• Cut off all leaves on the lower half of the stem. You are aiming to ripen fruit at this stage and reduce disease problems. Bag up, or make into a pile and cover, anything you cut off and don’t add to the compost heap if there is any sign of disease.
• Keep feeding with a potash rich feed. You can scatter wood ash round plants if that’s what you have got, just be sure that no other materials have been burned to make the ash.
• Leave greenhouse and polytunnel doors open as much as you can – ventilation is more important than temperature at this stage.
• Some people cut off the tops of plants when four trusses have formed. I prefer to leave the plants grow on even if they get a bit unruly. It’s perfectly possible to get six or more trusses ripening well through a mild autumn.

Enjoy the tomato glut! (Photo: Ben Russell)

Pumpkins and squash

You have to have a lot of space to grow these plants. Shoots ramble over a wide distance from the planting point. You can redirect shoots that are in the wrong place, but you do have to take care when moving them – It’s all too easy to break stems and lose the growing point.

Keep plants watered and mostly it’s a case of letting them do their thing. There should be some small fruits set at this stage and these swell pretty quickly. If you are growing small varieties then you should get several fruits per plant. Larger varieties will sometimes just produce one monster pumpkin.

If plants are producing flowers, but not setting fruit, then break off a male flower laden with dry pollen and use it to pollinate some female ones (these have a small fruit behind the flower).

Lift growing fruits onto boards, slates or equivalent, if you want to keep the underside clean. This matters more for a Halloween pumpkin or for one that is to be served whole as a centrepiece for a meal. Don’t harvest until the fruit has stopped swelling and has reached a good colour – this is usually from late August through to October.

Some varieties keep for months – check the packet and use the ones with shorter keeping times first.

Buddleia

This shrub is easy to grow and is often seen on roadsides where it has self-seeded. It’s not a problem to keep the shrub under control in a garden setting, it’s just a matter of pruning back hard in the spring to keep things to the size and shape that you want. Flowering occurs on the new season’s growth so there’s no benefit to letting stems grow on unpruned. Deadheading faded flower spikes will keep the plant flowering for longer.

Buddleia is called ‘the butterfly bush’ and it’s a real delight to see butterflies gather on the purple flowers. Anything that attracts and feeds butterflies is only to be encouraged. Look for pink, white and mauve varieties of buddleia if you want a change from the more common purple.

Keep sowing

Salad leaves and lettuce, spring cabbage, spinach, chard and more for autumn and winter crops.