Jobs in the vegetable plot for early October

Shirley Lanigan advises gardeners that nature abhors a vacuum and there are useful jobs you can do in the garden at this time of year to maintain it — as well as plants that you can sow

It is a good feeling to arrive into October having enjoyed a warm, mostly dry and for a few precious days, glorious September. Having put up with such a topsy turvy, wet and dull summer, we are even more grateful for a decent stretch of Indian summer than we would normally be. It somehow feels as though that good weather has put the gardening year back on track.
The monsoon summer is over and things feel right again. We can plan and do the seasonal jobs that need seeing to. The garden is, after its bad start, still offering up food to be eaten and stored. Cabbages are often left in the ground until we want to use them. This is fine but left out in the open they tend to attract predators.
Cutting them, removing the outside yellow leaves and storing them in a cool dark place can prolong their storage life by quite a bit. Go through the heads in as far as you can to pull out the slugs that will otherwise happily feast on the leaves in the peace and quiet of the shed when they are being stored.
Priceless certainties
Some people recommend sprinkling a bit of salt about the plants to deter slugs. I am not sure that anything short of a great deal of salt would fully see to a slug attack and that is hardly safe or sensible.Potatoes still left in the ground should be dug up and stored too. Obviously discard any slug damaged tubers. If slightly damaged, they can be used immediately. Just cut the affected areas out. The best ways to store potatoes is to start by brushing off the excess soil.
Then leave them lie out on sheets of paper or wire racks for a few hours to dry them fully. Next pack them away in double brown paper bags or sacks, or even hessian sacks if you can get hold of them. Leave the top of the bags slightly open to allow air to circulate. Store them in a dry very dark spot between five and 10 degrees.
Remember that light is the enemy of the spud. Light turns them green and poisonous.
All this may seem a bit over the top and fussy for a few potatoes when you can buy them so cheaply. But remind yourself that you grew these babies yourself. They are probably tastier than the shop bought potatoes and you know for certain that they were grown without recourse to a battery of chemicals. You also know just how good the compost you grew them in was.
These are priceless certainties that should be kept in mind as you begin to think that life is too short to be spent cleaning and storing spuds… Apart from everything else, this sort of work is relaxing. Carrots can be lifted and stored in trays of sand in a dark dry shed if you want. Turnips, kohlrabi, Swedes and celeriac can be treated in this way too.
Riddled with holes
They need to be stored at temperatures below five degrees, lower than potatoes which can live happily up to 10 degrees. But parsnips, beetroots, celeriac and carrots can also be left in the ground until you need to use them. Parsnips benefit particularly from being left in the ground during the cold months as the cold temperatures convert the starch in the roots to sugar, making them sweeter and tastier.
The only problem is that crops left in the ground tend to attract the attention of slugs, worms and other hungry creatures and you might dig them up to find them riddled with holes. So decide yourself.
French beans
Any runner or French beans still on plants are, by now big, starchy and quite a way past their best. Cut the plants to the ground, but do not dig them up. Hang the stems with their pods attached upside down in a warm dry spot for a week or so. Then empty the pods and leave them dry out for a further few days on wire cake racks before decanting them into dry sealed jars for use in casseroles and stews over the winter.
Meanwhile there is a good reason for leaving the roots of peas, beans and other leguminous crops in the ground. The reason for this is so that the nitrogen and other nutrients which these roots contain in particular abundance can be returned to the soil as the roots die down, enriching the ground for a hungry crop next year.
In the natural scheme of things as you take one crop out of the ground, the chances are that it will be replaced by another, self-sown one – of weeds. This is exactly what you do not want. In the past, the advice was to dig the ground over thoroughly, take out all weeds and keep it bare and weeded over winter, perhaps covering it with a tarpaulin of sorts.
But nature abhors a vacuum and bare soil is, in the eyes of nature, a vacuum. Planting a green manure is a smart move to make now. This will do several things. Firstly it will protect the bed from being colonized by weeds over winter. Green manures are fast growing crops that quickly cover the soil. After a few months, when they have grown, you simply go at them with a shovel, turning over the earth, chopping the crop up and digging it in where it will feed the soil organically. This is the sustainable, green way to weed and feed.
Winter
The first two weeks of October are good times in which to sow some green manures. The seed can be bought in any good garden centre. Try Vicia faba, or field beans, Vicia sativa, or winter tares, or Secale cereale – Hungarian grazing rye. These are hardy and can be left to grow over winter.
There are proper crops that can be sown too: Garlic can be planted from now up until November. It benefits from spending a period of cold weather in the ground. Whatever you do, resist planting garlic bought in the supermarket or brought home from a warm weather holiday.
Garlic grown in hot dry countries is absolutely unsuited to life in the cold, damp Irish soil. In the garden centre you will find varieties bred to live in our climate. Two or three bulbs will break into several dozen cloves, each of which will grow into a bulb next year. Discard the very small and puny cloves. Big juicy cloves will grow into more impressive plants. Plant them in an open well drained spot. If planting in blocks, as you might in the ornamental garden, leave about 20 cms between each clove.
Grow them yourself
If planting them in more classic vegetable garden rows, leave about 10 cms between each clove and 20 cms between each row. Garlic is an easy crop that requires little fussing. Water the cloves in spring if there is a dry spell. Keep them free of weeds and you will be able to harvest them next July or August.
If you have a cold frame, an unheated greenhouse or lengths of fleece tunneling you can still sow salad crops for use over winter. There are some varieties of lettuce particularly suited to living in the ground over winter. But if space is plentiful and you still have summer salad seed left over from the past year, why not try to use up some of that as well. I have found that in mild winters it is surprising how many of the summer salads will grow to healthy baby leaf stage over the next few months.
They taste particularly delicious out of season when you grow them yourself. And the surprise of what might grow and might not adds to the fun. There is no real loss as seed kept over winter loses its viability and you will need to buy fresh seed next year anyway. But in the meantime, buy a packet of winter lettuce seed as an insurance policy for at least one guaranteed crop.
Coming growing season
The best winter lettuces are ‘Winter Density’ and ‘Brune d’hiver’. They can be sown in modules or trays or directly into the ground but the success levels will be higher if you use modules. When they are big enough to handle, the little plants can be transferred out in the ground, under glass or cloche in about four to six weeks.
Lastly, if you grow asparagus, now is the time to cut back the tall, feathery foliage for the winter. Once this is done, clear the weeds out of the bed without digging down too far to where you might interfere with and damage the precious asparagus roots.
Finish off by piling on a good thick mulch of compost or farmyard manure over the dormant bed. This will set up the plants well for the coming growing season.