‘If in doubt, make chutney, but there’s still veg excitement to come’

Salt Of The Earth, a gardening column by Sam Hawcroft

It’ll soon be September, which is, going by the meteorological calendar, the beginning of autumn – heralding shorter, chilly nights, fallen leaves and Christmas tat in the shops four months early.

The weather seems to have stolen a march on all this, though, as much of August has felt less than summery, and there haven’t been many days when I’ve wanted to sit out and enjoy the garden with a glass of something cold.

That, for me, is the hallmark of a good summer – the number of ‘sitting out’ nights, as well as the number of times I have to wear socks to prevent a serious case of ‘cerld ters’. Not enough of the former, and too far many of the latter. I hate socks.

Anyway. Just as I will be carefully wrapping up this column and putting it in storage over the winter, many of the gardening jobs I’ve been doing lately have been of the winding down/tidying up kind. The joy of spring is but a distant memory.

Gardening programmes talk a lot about “plants for year-round interest”, but once the temperature starts to plunge, so does my enthusiasm. If it’s not clement enough outside to enjoy the plants, then I feel that it’s pointless putting all my energies – and money – into something I’m not going to look at much.

So I’ve ripped out all the tatty tomato plants from the greenhouse, removed all the fruit and prepared the bed for winter salad leaves.

Every year I try to ensure a constant supply and I never quite achieve it, leaving a couple of barren months during which I have to – oh, the horror – buy bags of spinach and rocket from the supermarket.

The one thing I did right this year was start the tomatoes off super-early, in mid-January, and get them in the greenhouse in May, and they’ve done brilliantly.

Loads and loads of ripe, delicious fruit, which I’ve used in all sorts including salads, a tomato tart, pasta sauces and a jar or two of oven-dried tomatoes, and I made a large batch of chutney from the green ones.

If I have one motto in life, it’s “If in doubt, make chutney.” I think I’ll get it inscribed on my gravestone.

HEALTHY RETURN: Sam’s tomatoes have done ‘brilliantly’

There’s nothing you can really do about the lack of tomatoes in the winter months, except buy inferior ones from supermarkets, but I did freeze a batch – it’s perfectly fine to just bung them in the freezer as they are, and they’ll be good in cooking, just not raw as they’ll be mushy.

I do this with chillies, too – just throw them in a bag and freeze, and when you need one, they’re easy to chop while frozen and put straight in the pan.

My chilli plants were OK this year, but I should have pinched out the growing tip early on so the plants bushed out a bit more; they’ve been in the ridiculously hot conservatory (which, as I said last time, isn’t as posh as it sounds, honestly) and, while they enjoyed the heat, they’ve got a bit too leggy.

The gherkin plants gave it everything they had, and then keeled over remarkably quickly. I’ll definitely grow those again, though, if only to be amazed by how far they snake up to the ceiling, and also to play the “find the hidden gherkin” game again – there’d always be one humongo-gherkin lurking somewhere and halting fruit production until it was discovered.

There is still a bit of veg excitement to come, as the sprouts are coming on nicely, and because I’ve netted them in those pop-up tent things, the cabbage white butterflies don’t seem to have ravaged them as much as in previous years.

I’ve got a few sweetcorn plants that should be ready in a month or so, and the pumpkin plants, after a bit of a bad start (I sowed them too early, and the weather wasn’t warm enough when I planted them out) are now snaking around the whole plot.

I also sowed a few carrots around the sprouts, and, while they won’t be massive, they should be enough for a few Sunday dinners.

In the past month or so I’ve also started to get more into composting. I’m not sure why I’ve not really got to grips with it sooner, but perhaps my main worry was the risk of spreading invasive weeds around the garden.

In theory, if you get your composting right, this shouldn’t happen as it should be hot enough to kill pernicious roots and seeds, but still… I’m not 100 per cent convinced.

I’ve started a standard 330-litre plastic bin off and have been filling it with grass cuttings, veg peelings and the top growth of some weeds, and trying to balance those out with ‘brown’ matter such as cardboard and woody plant cuttings.

‘VEG EXCITEMENT TO COME’: Sam’s pumpkin and sweetcorn

It’s early days yet but at the moment the zillions of woodlice and worms seem to be doing their thing.

I got the bin from getcomposting.com, which works in partnership with local councils to offer discounts on compost bins, wormeries and water butts and is well worth checking out as the prices seem to be even better than Amazon’s.

While I was browsing, I was intrigued by the bokashi bins, so I took a punt and bought two. They come in pairs because the idea is that you fill one bin with food (they’re quite a bit larger than the council-supplied caddies), and every time you do so, you give it a sprinkle with special bokashi bran.

When the bin’s full, you put it to one side while the rapid composting process gets going, and then you start filling the second bin.

The bins also have a tap which releases liquid that can be diluted and used as a plant fertiliser; you can also sling it down the sink neat, and it’s supposed to help keep drains clear. It took us about a month to fill the first bin, and we’ve nearly filled the second one.

I’ll have to update you all early next year to see how these bins work over the next few months, but they look like a great idea and they’ve already stopped a fairly large amount of food waste going in the brown bin (we also put a lot of scraps out for the birds, whose appetites know no bounds).

One more job I need to do in the next month or so is to mow the ‘meadow’ area and sow some yellow rattle seeds to prevent it becoming so full of grass next year.

To hack away at the really long grass first I’ve bought a ‘scythette’, which sounds like something the Grim Reaper of the Smurfs would have about his person. It looks less like a garden tool than a lethal hockey stick, but it does the job OK.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my gardening witterings this summer; I’m no expert, but that’s kind of the point. I’m learning with each passing year and doing as much as I can while holding down various other jobs – not least reporting on Hull City’s home games this season!

Follow me on Instagram for garden updates @sam_inthegarden, and I’ll see you next spring.