Now’s the time to make the most of the last sunny days as frost returns to our veg patches.

Focus on crops that will enjoy a protective throw-over of ‘horticultural fleece’. This lightweight fabric holds back the colder weather to extend the harvest season by a good fortnight. Just long enough to hasten your would-be lunch…

Try fleece over French bean, runner bean, Chinese cabbage, pea, outdoor tomato, and marrow.
(Links open PDFs)

The extra warmth is especially useful for saving seed when this grace period helps ripen fruit. Read more at Garden Organic’s webpage for Heritage Seed Library.

Weigh down fleece with wooden batons or rocks.

Movable heating

Another way for getting ‘hot under the vegetable collar’, so to speak, is covering selected crops for a few weeks with ‘cloches’. These deflect heavy rain and nudge up the temperature for extra growth.

Use cloches made from recycled plastic bottles with their bottom cut off. Or how about durable tunnels made from plastic or wire hoops covered in thick transparent plastic.

Use to cover carrot, lettuce, salad onion, beetroot, kohl rabi, rocket, oriental salads, strawberry, autumn and winter salads, and annual spinach (Links open PDFs).

This delightful cloche protection can move around your patch to extend the harvest until the temperature and light level fall too low over winter.

Garden Organic’s growing resources

Click here to discover unusual crops (opens ‘Sowing New Seed’ project website)

Step by step growing activities…

Become a Garden Organic member…

What to do in the garden now

Lively growing blogs by volunteer Master Gardeners:
Warwickshire, North London, South London, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire

Article by Philip Turvil