Successful veg growers all love late summer and autumn, when there are gluts of runner beans, juicy sweetcorn cobs are at their best and outdoor tomatoes, lettuce, beetroot, courgettes, onions and a plethora of other edibles are ripe for the picking.
But if you want veg all year round you need to plan ahead to ensure your plots are utilised to the maximum, whatever the season.
“So obviously, spring, summer and autumn are great times. There’s a myriad of stuff that you can sow and most things are going to do fantastically well outside, but there’s less choice in the winter,” says Lucy Hutchings, co-founder with Kate Cotterill of award-winning heirloom seed company She Grows Veg, which is exhibiting a secret woodland dining display called Feast at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
“So make sure you plan ahead. You have to sow some varieties a lot sooner than a lot of people think.”
Plan winter crops
The main sowing time for winter crops is summer, ideally June or July, says Hutchings.
“You can sow all kinds of brassicas – cabbages, kales, cauliflowers. These are all super hardy, great for sowing for winter veg.”
Root veg can be sown even later for a winter crop, she continues. “It tends to be cold hardy and will swell nicely even as the weather’s cooling down,” she says. “In August you can still be sowing things like beetroot and carrots.”
Don’t forget Asian greens
“These tend to be really cold hardy and thrive through the colder months, giving you that fresh, green food that you want when there’s not a lot else around. So things like pak choi can be added to the list.” They can be sown from summer through to early autumn, she says.
Continue with salad leaves
Cold hardy lettuces and cold hardy mizuna are good choices, plus chicory could be added to the mix, as it comes into its own when the weather turns colder, she suggests. They can be sown in late summer for harvests in late winter.
“It looks like a boring green lettuce most of the summer, but once the frost hits it, it brings out colour in the leaves, which go really dark purple. So when you haven’t got flowers or anything else in the garden, use vegetables to give you that flash of colour.”
What about protection?
You don’t necessarily need to cover your veg in winter, but it depends where the bed is situated and where you are in the country, she says.
“Part of it is knowing your growing environment. If you’re in a smaller, sheltered garden, you probably don’t need to use any protection.
“Brassicas require protection in summer because everything wants to eat them. In summer you’ll need to put some fine netting over them, something that’s fine enough to keep butterflies out, because cabbage whites in particular will sniff them out in no time.
“If they get a chance to lay eggs on them they can absolutely decimate a brassica crop. So you want a fine insect netting.
“In winter, especially if you have a garden that gets harder frosts and is maybe more northerly or exposed, you want to protect some of the leafy crops. I would protect any winter salad leaves or winter Asian greens. Those are the ones that are more likely to suffer a little.
“Cover them with fleece. If you have cloches or polytunnels, that’s great, but if you don’t want to invest in something like that, then simply laying some horticultural fleece over the top and weighing it down with a couple of bricks or stones will do the trick.”
Alternatively, sow undercover
You can sow winter crops undercover if you have a greenhouse or polytunnel, for extra protection, which will probably result in a slightly earlier crop of brassicas, she says.
Crops to overwinter
Sow some crops in autumn for an early crop the following year, including broad beans and peas, which you can sow from September through to November, she says. You can also sow them in early spring for a crop in the summer.
Store some veg
“When you’re choosing the crops that you’re going to grow through summer, add into that some things that are going to provide you with food that you can store through winter.
“This doesn’t necessarily have to be things that are going to be very labour intensive, requiring lots of chutney-making and preservation techniques. There are lots of things that are simple to store away, and you can be eating them in the colder months – beans, for example.
“When you’re choosing your French beans, add a variety that’s really good for drying, or there are lots of types that are like dual-purpose crops. You can have fantastic fresh green beans and when you’ve had enough of them, leave them on the plant, and then the remaining ones can be dried and stored in a glass jar over winter.”
She recommends the borlotti bean ‘Firetongue’ and the runner bean ‘Czar’ which if left on the plant and produces fat butter beans.
“Make sure the beans you are storing are really dry. I like them to semi-dry on the plant, so you leave the pods on the plant. You can see the beans are swelling inside the pods, then I harvest them and then shell them.”
Dry them on a baking sheet in an airing cupboard or somewhere dry and airy for two to three weeks before storing them in an airtight glass jar and they should keep for years, she says.