Savour spinach all year round, plant autumn raspberries and remember to hoe, hoe, hoe
The taste of young spinach leaves, sprinkled with chopped red onions and drizzled with walnut oil, is unbeatable.
Spinach is easy to grow and there are varieties that will provide you with an almost year-round supply of leaves. The secret to keeping these sweet is to pick them while they are young and tasty and to ensure they don’t run short of water as this will also affect the taste.
Lots of oriental vegetables can be sown now for harvesting from August onwards but make sure you don’t allow the seeds to get too hot, otherwise germination will be patchy.
Raspberries are ideally suited to our mild and damp climate and if you add some autumn-fruiting varieties to the veg patch then you could be picking these over a long period.
Autumn raspberries are easier to grow than those that fruit in summer as all you need to do is to cut the canes to ground level in February and they will regrow to provide fruit from late August until the end of October.
Meanwhile, keep removing the side shoots from tomatoes and take off the leaves below the first truss when the plants reach 1.2m tall then continue to remove yellowing leaves as the season progresses.
As earlier crops finish, clear away the top growth and add this to the compost heap and keep on top of weeds as these will compete with veg for water and nutrients. Hoeing regularly doesn’t just remove weeds, it also breaks the capillary action that would otherwise allow moisture from deeper in the soil to be lost through evaporation, so a hoe is a vital tool at this time of the year.
If you are using it in the flower garden, however, be careful that it isn’t just weeds you remove as the seed dropped by spring flowers may have started to germinate, so look out for these and move them to places where you’d like to see them grow.