Autumn gardening - October vegetables

Continue harvesting carrots and potatoes for storage, ensuring crops are dry and clean. Never store any produce showing signs of damage or infection as it will just run rampant through your entire crop. Finish picking outdoor tomatoes in the next couple of weeks or they may succumb to disease. Green tomatoes can be picked to ripen separately or you can unpot the roots and hang the entire plant in the greenhouse so the fruit can ripen on the vine. Alternatively you can make green tomato chutney. Once the skins of ripe marrows have hardened in the sun, they can be cut and stored for winter by setting them on a wide shelf in a cool shed, so the air circulates around them - don't put marrows on wire shelves as the wire will cut through the skin and cause the inner flesh to rot or take in diseases. Finish harvesting autumn-ripening raspberries and remember that any canes that fruited this year can be cut down to soil level because the new canes that form in the spring will produce a crop next autumn. Lay onions on greenhouse staging so that their tops and roots desiccate completely before storing.

Locally popular and hardy varieties of peas and broad beans can be sown now, bearing in mind that nearly all of them will respond to being given some cloche protection in winter, especially in extremely cold areas or where wind chill might drop the temperature even further. Plant out selected varieties of garlic and - if you grow them - Japanese onion sets which are suitable for autumn planting. Remember the Japanese onions need different treatment to our own native species.

Plan now for autumn and winter fruit planting, by ordering new varieties of fruit trees, bushes and cane fruits.

Pot up herbs so that they can be grown in a porch or on a windowsill for use during winter. Thyme, basil and coriander are the best - your bay tree and rosemary will over-winter perfectly however cold the winter.

October veg photograph by iLoveButter, used under a creative commons attribution licence