Grow your own veg box

Autumn vegetables

Image: Autumn harvest, third week of November (in box, clockwise from top left): onion ‘Centurion’; leek ‘Jolant’; kales ‘Redbor’ and ‘Giant Sutherland’; garlic; parsnip ‘Halblange’; bulb fennel ‘Montebianco’; chicory ‘Sugar Loaf’; carrot ‘Ceres’; beetroot ‘Sanguigna d’Ingegnoli’; squash ‘Anna Schwartz’; kohlrabi ‘Super Schmelz’; turnip ‘Tiny Pal’; squash ‘Butternut’. (Foreground, left to right): Swiss chard ‘Bright Lights’; tomato ‘Ferline’; sweet pepper ‘Sweet Orange Baby’; potato ‘Charlotte’; chicories ‘Lusia’ (green) and ‘Marzatica’ (red).

Autumn is the season of bounty, the hardest to characterise by harvest as so much is in season, especially in early autumn when summer and winter overlap! There can still be tomatoes, courgettes, beans, peppers and aubergines until the first frost, as well as the first leeks, winter squashes, celeriac, turnips and kale. Late September may still feel like summer, and is often the best time for sweet peppers to turn colour.

Into winter

By October the tide turns to more earthy vegetables with carrots sown in mid-June (to avoid carrot root fly), bulb fennel (which often performs best in autumn) from sowings in July, turnip from sowings up to mid-August, and potatoes from late cultivars such as ‘Cara’ and ‘Pink Fir Apple’. Potato ‘Charlotte’ and other earlies can be harvested in July. For leeks in autumn, grow fast-growing cultivars such as ‘Jolant’, ‘Porvite’ and Autumn Mammoth Group, although higher yielding and less frost resistant than winter cultivars.

Autumn salads can include leaves from lettuce, Oriental vegetables such as mizuna, pak choi and mustards, endives - both frizzy and scarole, chicories such as the radicchios, rocket, spinach and some herby additions such as chervil and flat-leaved parsley. Remember that autumn is the key time for sowing many of next spring’s vegetables.

Detailed growing information