Top Tips for: September

September in the garden...

September is another fickle month. Some years we have a wonderful Indian summer and others autumn arrives early. Still, it's very much a harvest month where we reap the rewards for our labours earlier in the year.

If you're fortunate enough to have apples or pear trees, then the chances are you're wondering what to do with them all. One solution is to turn them into juice. (See John Harrison's recipe for making Cider)

 You can drink the juice as it comes, freeze it to enjoy    throughout the year or turn it into delicious home made cider or perry. You will find a fruit press saves you a lot of time and is far more efficient at getting every precious out.

With all this harvesting going on at this time of year, you'll be producing a lot of 'waste'. Potato haulm, sweetcorn stalks and brassica stems. Of course, to the gardener, there is no waste, just compost material. If you have the use of  a shredder, it's well worth shredding the more woody materials. It's amazing how quickly shredded materials rot down compared with normal. The shredded pile is heating up before you have even got it to the heap.


If you don't have a shredder, try bashing thick brassica stalks with a lump hammer. It will break them up enough to get them rotted down in one go.
I always make my compost heap in 6 inch layers, dusting each alternate layer with garden lime and the next layer gets a nitrogen source like pelleted chicken manure or dried blood. You can also use a small amount (about a tablespoon) of sulphate of ammonia. This method gets the heap heating quickly and the lime keeps it sweet. By sweet, we mean the lime stops it from being too acid.

We love tomatoes and as well as the greenhouse tomatoes, I grow a row of outdoor plum tomatoes to bottle and freeze throughout the year. The main trouble is that due to the British summer, as we jokingly call it, often there are lots of green and immature tomatoes as the weather turns colder.

There is an answer, you can extend the season by cloching the tomatoes with insulating fleece. You need to provide some large hoops to support the fleece over the plants but these last for years and you should get a few years use at least from the fleece. Incidentally, there are different qualities of fleece and the cheap ones do not, in my experience, give good value. They rip easily and you're lucky to get two years from them.

The other problem with my outdoor tomatoes is the dreaded slug. I grow the plants through weed suppressant matting, more to keep the fruit clean than suppress weeds and to make slug spotting easier.


Although there are lots of slug barriers available, I just lightly scatter some advanced slug pellets around.

They're wildlife and pet friendly, which is very important, but I find they are more rainproof than the conventional metaldehyde based pellets. Don't put down too many at a time, follow the instructions and use sparingly.

Talking of slug pellets, when storing potatoes, drop a few pellets into the sacks with them. You'll be amazed how often a slug is hiding in a potato, waiting to come out and damage more of your crop in store. The pellets attract them out of hiding and kill them.

Copyright © John Harrison 2008
Author of the Best Selling "Vegetable Growing - Month by Month Guide"  and Editor of the Allotment Website: www.allotment.org.uk