Garden guru: Sow easy

Photo / Herald on Sunday

It's easy in autumn to get so carried away with harvesting that you forget to start the next round of edibles. There is so much to bring in, especially late fruits of the "cocktail kiwi" - a kiwifruit that's easy to grow at home with clusters of smooth, small fruit. Crabapples are ready too, along with passionfruit, persimmon and the tangy fruits of the cherry guava which are tart but packed with vitamin C. But a "real" vege garden carries on all year.

Harvesting runs side by side with sowing and because I don't want to be labelled only a fair-weather gardener I need to think ahead. Sowing and planting autumn veg is always a struggle. For a start, the wreckage of this year's efforts seems to engulf my modest beds, making little room for dibbling in the next crop.

This year my pumpkins seem to have run riot but forgotten to bear fruit. The last batch of sweetcorn is still tantalisingly close to yielding a handful of delicious cobs and the mangled wreckage of beans and zucchini still sit waiting to be cleared away. But apart from the mess, it's the comparatively slow pace of winter veg which makes them slightly less exciting an adventure than their summer counterparts. We have to sow them knowing that our results may not be seen until the weather warms in spring and that seems like such a long way off. Sowing of many winter veg would have been best finished a month or two back but if, like me, you always seem to be running behind, and if you enjoy a mild climate especially, you can still try sowing the likes of beetroot, broccoli, bok choy, carrots and cauliflower. Or better still, visit the garden centre and buy young, established plants for planting such as cabbages, kales and giant, red mustard (brassica rapa), which is an easy winter leaf with a mild peppery taste. The look of the vege garden is almost as important as how it all tastes and these large winter brassicas provide plenty of form and texture through the cold months.

Winter veg like these are the slow burners, but part of their appeal is that you can pop them in now and forget all about them and, like a winter casserole, when you lift the lid after a long simmer there will be something delicious to devour.

Asparagus crowns can be bought from nurseries from now until mid-winter. They take several years growing before you can even think about harvesting the young spears but if you can make a raised bed and provide the right light, well-drained soil and sunny spot they need you could be harvesting spears for decades, which makes them worth a bit of prep and a wait. Asparagus is a bulky crop so you'll need a bit of space. While crowns are maturing in spring, sow fast salads, herbs or even annual flowers like cosmos between the rows so the space isn't wasted.

Leeks should have been planted a month ago and should be fattening up in the sunken holes they were planted in. However, it's not too late to dibble in a row of peas - another cool season crop which will slowly swell through winter - in the same way that it's traditional to sow broad beans now for an early spring harvest. Sow them in double rows, alternately spaced, and choose a bright part of the vege garden that's well sheltered from wind.

Mice love peas and can easily devastate a crop, to counter this you could grow plants in deep pots on a bench and plant out later.

Garlic and shallots are another group of slow burners which will take many months to swell. Shallots are sweeter and much easier to grow than traditional onions, although just a bit more fiddly in the kitchen. As with garlic plants, the baby or "seed" bulbs of shallots should be planted shallowly - just pushed in up to their necks - in a light soil. Salads are always welcome through winter. Traditionally bitter-tasting chicory were the cold-season lettuce make-do but with a protective cloche you can continue growing all sorts of leaves.

The one I was most impressed with last winter was the humble lamb's lettuce or corn salad.

Though the neat little rosettes are fiddly to wash and prepare, they are so easy to grow and their soft, mild leaves with a lettuce-like taste and texture, always gave me that thrill of having produced something myself whenever I sprinkled some in a winter sandwich.

And if after you've cleared the vege garden of summer's wreckage and planted your selection of winter crops you find there's still plenty of bare soil left, don't rush off the armchair yet, sow what's left with a "green manure" - also called a cover crop.

A cover crop is a selection of fast-growing annuals used to protect the soil from winter rains but more importantly it becomes a soil conditioner and fertiliser when, in spring, it is dug into the soil.

Legumes like annual lupins are popular to use as they fix nitrogen in their roots while greens like buckwheat and mustards are fast as well as being rich in potassium.

All these provide organic matter for the soil as they rot down. Sow them now and simply dig them into the soil a few weeks before you need to use it in spring.