Kitchen Garden Diary, September

September 3

My ‘Crown Prince’ pumpkins are ripening beautifully on the vine, and I’ll leave them there for as long as possible before cutting them. I have always loved growing pumpkins and squash. They bear such large, tangible fruit in so many colours, shapes and sizes that you can’t help but get excited about them. They are also fantastic store cupboard vegetables, lasting for months if you keep them cool and dry, and great for soup, roasts or middle eastern dishes. With chalky blue-grey skin and deep orange flesh, ‘Crown Prince’ is the one that I come back to year after year because of its reliability and flavour. It is delicious, with a sweet, nutty flavour comparable to butternut squash, but even better. Actually in every way I think it is better than butternut squash (which I have given up trying to grow in our unpredictable summers), as it is less demanding, cropping prolifically even when light levels are low. The key is finding varieties that fruit early enough in the season to be able to ripen before the days start drawing in. I sowed this year’s crop in late April in the greenhouse, putting individual seeds in 7cm pots. All six germinated (good quality seeds from chilternseeds.co.uk) so I gave four away as I only had room for two plants. I planted them out into a 2m x 2m bed in June when the weather warmed up and they have gone from strength to strength, the vines spilling madly out over the paths – so much so that I have had to pinch out the ends of the growing shoots in places so that the plant puts more energy into forming fruit rather than greenery. I asked the kids to do a tally this afternoon, wading through the leaves and finding the pumpkins underneath: 11 in total, they reported back, not bad for two plants and more than enough to last until next May or June I’d say. If you have limited space, you could try ‘Burgess Vine Buttercup’ which produces dark green fruit with a lighter bluey green ‘button’ underneath, or the blue-grey, pear-shaped ‘Sibley Squash’, both which are you can get from realseeds.co.uk.

September 10

This month is all about harvesting, and I’m spending lots of time blanching beans and making ratatouille out of the mountain of tomatoes that keep coming in a steady stream from the greenhouse. I also picked my first handful of ‘Autumn Bliss’ raspberries today from the plants that I put in last year. I grow autumn raspberries only, which are much easier than summer raspberries: firstly because they don’t need to be netted (the birds are finding plenty of other food to forage on in the wild at this time of year) and secondly because they are more straightforward to prune. Whereas the summer varieties fruit on one-year-old stems which need to be pruned out after the harvest, leaving new growth intact, autumn varieties fruit on the same year’s growth, so you can prune the whole plant back down to the ground in February. There really weren’t enough raspberries to take back into the kitchen I’m afraid, so I ate them, one after another, straight from the plant – a gardener’s prerogative, surely. Slightly warm from the late summer sun, they tasted clean, sharp and sweet, with that intensity of flavour that you just don’t seem to get with shop-bought fruit and veg. It’s moments like these that remind me why I’m doing this.

September 19

I’m starting to clear beds now as crops go over. It’s easy to lose motivation and become dispirited as the growing season comes to an end, but I’m determined to keep on top of it this year. When I had an allotment it was easy to ignore it, out of sight out of mind, but now I’m growing veg in the garden it’s all in full view to remind me of my laziness. The runner bean vines had half collapsed and were turning yellow, so I cleared them today, leaving the roots in to rot back down. Peas, beans and other legumes are nitrogen fixers, sucking nitrogen from the air and storing it in nodules in their roots, meaning that the roots themselves, when dug back in, can help to add nutrients to the soil. I will plant cabbages and kale in this bed next year as the brassicas above all other groups of vegetables are what garden writers often call ‘greedy feeders’, doing best in a nitrogen-rich soil.

Checklist for September

Keep up with the harvesting to ensure the vegetable plants keep cropping. Dig up maincrop potatoes and dry them before storing in sacks. Raise pumpkins and squash up from the ground on bricks or stones. Remove any crops that have finished and clear away weeds to leave your plot tidy. Sow a green manure on empty beds.