Is it too late to plant tomatoes? In the UK, the honest answer for early August is: too late to start them from seed for this year, but not necessarily too late to buy and plant an established plant if you have a greenhouse or a warm, sheltered spot. Tomatoes need a long, warm season to crop, and sowing seed now leaves nowhere near enough time for plants to grow, flower, and ripen fruit before the cold arrives. But a garden-centre plant already in flower, given warmth and shelter, can still give you a modest late crop of small or cherry tomatoes. So the real answer depends on whether you mean from seed or from a plant, and on what growing space you have. Let me walk you through exactly what is realistic now, and what to do instead if you have genuinely missed the window.

I have grown tomatoes for over twenty years on my Oxfordshire plot, and I have made this exact mistake, hopefully sowing seed far too late one hopeful July and getting nothing but leggy plants and green fruit that never ripened. So I understand the worry behind the question. Let me give you a straight, realistic answer rather than false hope, because knowing when to cut your losses and plan for next year is part of being a good gardener too.

From Seed: Yes, It Is Too Late

Let us be honest about sowing tomato seed. By August, it is too late to sow tomatoes from seed in the UK and expect a crop this year. Tomatoes need roughly five to six months from sowing to harvest, so seed sown now would not produce ripe fruit until well into the autumn or winter, long after the warmth and light have gone. You would end up nursing small, struggling plants indoors with little or nothing to show for it.

The sensible sowing window for tomatoes in the UK is late winter to early spring, typically February to April, so they are ready to plant out after the last frost. If you are reading this in August and thinking about seed, the honest advice is to wait and sow at the right time next year, which is covered fully in when to plant tomatoes. Sowing now is one of those hopeful moves that almost always disappoints.

From a Plant: Maybe, With Shelter

Buying an established plant is a different matter, and here there is a bit more hope. If you can still find a healthy tomato plant already in flower or carrying small fruit at a garden centre, and you have a greenhouse, conservatory, or a very warm, sheltered, sunny spot, it is worth a try. The plant has already done the slow early growing, so it only needs to ripen the fruit it sets, which a warm late summer can just about manage, especially with quick-ripening cherry varieties.

Be realistic about the crop, though. You are looking at a modest handful of fruit rather than a glut, and outdoors without shelter your chances drop sharply as the nights cool. Under glass, or on a warm windowsill, the odds are much better. Give the plant the same care as any tomato, steady watering and a high-potash feed, as in caring for tomato plants, and you may be pleasantly surprised by a late picking.

Why Tomatoes Need So Long

It helps to understand why the window matters so much, because it is not arbitrary. Tomatoes are warm-season plants that originated in a much hotter climate than ours, and they need a long stretch of warmth and light to grow, flower, set fruit, and then ripen it. In the UK our warm season is genuinely short, which is why timing is tighter here than in warmer countries. The RHS guide to growing tomatoes sets out the full timeline. Miss the early start and there simply are not enough warm, bright weeks left in the year to see fruit through to ripe.

This is also why so many UK tomato problems, from poor fruit set to fruit that will not ripen, come down to not enough warmth and time. Understanding your season, and your local frost dates, is the key to getting tomatoes right, and it is why the early sowing window is worth respecting rather than pushing your luck with a late one.

If You Have Green Tomatoes Now

A related worry at this time of year is not late planting but late ripening: you have plants covered in green fruit and you are wondering if they will ever turn red before the cold. The good news is that even if the season runs out, green tomatoes are not wasted. You can ripen them indoors on a windowsill or in a drawer with a banana, whose ethylene gas speeds ripening, or turn a glut of stubborn green ones into chutney.

So if your existing plants are racing the cold, do not panic. There is a full method in how to ripen green tomatoes, and it means a late or slow year still gives you a usable crop. This is a very different situation from planting late, and a much more hopeful one, since the fruit already exists and just needs coaxing to ripen.

What You Can Plant Instead

If it really is too late for tomatoes this year, the cheering news is that August is far from the end of the growing season, and plenty of other crops can still go in now for an autumn or even winter harvest. Quick salad leaves, lettuce, radishes, spring onions, and oriental greens all have time to crop before winter, and hardy crops like spinach and chard sown now will give you pickings into the colder months. It is a good moment to fill the gap the tomatoes cannot.

There is a full rundown of what still works this late in is it too late to plant vegetables and the specifics in what to sow in August. Turning your attention to these crops is far more rewarding than nursing a doomed late tomato, and keeps your garden productive right through to the end of the year. The quick, easy ones are covered in easy vegetables to grow.

Getting Ahead for Next Year

If the honest answer of too late for tomatoes has landed with a thud, the best cure is to channel that keenness into next year, when you can grow them properly from the start. Make a note now to sow your tomato seed in February or March, so your plants are strong and ready to go out after the last frost. Getting the timing right from the beginning is the single biggest factor in a good tomato year, far more than any clever trick later on, something the wider planting calendar helps you plan.

It is also worth spending the autumn and winter improving the soil where your tomatoes will go, since rich, healthy soil makes for stronger plants, as covered in improving your garden soil. Then come spring you will be ready to grow tomatoes the right way, following how to grow tomatoes from sowing to harvest. A little patience now sets up a far better crop than any rushed late planting ever could.

Growing Tomatoes in Containers Next Time

One thing worth planning for, if space or a short season is your worry, is growing tomatoes in pots next year, since containers let you start plants in a sheltered spot and move them to catch every scrap of warmth and sun. Pot-grown tomatoes can be brought under cover on cold nights and out into the sun by day, which extends their season at both ends and is a real advantage in our climate. It is one of the best ways to get a reliable crop in a tricky British summer.

There is guidance on this in growing vegetables in pots, and it applies well to tomatoes. Combined with an early start and a warm spot, container growing gives you the best possible chance of a good crop, and sidesteps the whole is it too late worry by getting you off to a strong, early, movable start. It is planning rather than panic, which is where good tomato growing always begins.

The Honest Answer

So, is it too late to plant tomatoes? From seed in August, yes, and it is kinder to tell you that plainly than to send you off on a doomed sowing. From an established plant with warmth and shelter, you have a slim but real chance of a small late crop, especially with cherry varieties under glass. And if you already have green fruit, you are not too late at all, just ripen them indoors. Match your effort to what is genuinely possible and you will not waste a season on false hope.

Above all, do not be disheartened. Every gardener has looked at the calendar in dismay at some point, and the answer is nearly always to plant something else now and get the timing right next year. Turn to the crops that still have time, plan your tomatoes properly for spring, and you will be a better and happier gardener for it. There is always something you can grow, whatever the month, as the wider tomato growing guides show.

Is It Too Late to Plant Tomatoes: Frequently Asked Questions

A Sensible Place to Start

If you are wondering whether it is too late to plant tomatoes, the honest answer is: too late from seed this year, but worth a try from an established plant if you have a greenhouse or a warm, sheltered spot and are happy with a small crop. And if you already have green fruit on the plant, you are not too late at all, simply ripen them indoors.

If it really has passed for tomatoes, do not waste the season sulking. Sow quick salad leaves and hardy greens now for an autumn crop, improve your soil over winter, and plan to sow your tomatoes in February or March next year. Get the timing right from the start and you will grow a far better crop than any rushed late planting could ever give you.

Is it too late to plant peas? In the UK it depends on where you are and which month you have reached, but the short answer for late summer is: it is borderline, and often worth a gamble. A quick early variety sown in early August can still crop in October in the milder south, though you are racing the autumn. Sow in July and you have a comfortable chance of a late crop; sow much past mid August and only the mildest gardens will ripen pods before the cold shuts things down. So if you have a spare row and a packet of a fast early pea, it is well worth a punt, as long as you go in with your eyes open about the odds.

Peas are one of those crops people assume have a narrow spring-only window, and every year I have gardeners on my heavy Oxfordshire clay ask me in July whether they have missed the boat entirely. The honest answer is more encouraging than they expect. Peas are hardy, they germinate happily in warm soil, and a late sowing has one real advantage over a spring one that almost nobody mentions. Let me talk you through when a late pea sowing works, when it genuinely is too late, and how to give a gamble sowing the best possible chance.

The Honest Answer, Month by Month

July

Not too late at all. A sowing in July, particularly early July, is a genuinely good late sowing that will crop from September into October across most of the country. This is the sweet spot for a second flush of peas, and if you sowed in spring, a July sowing keeps the harvest going once the first lot is over. Choose a quick early variety rather than a maincrop, and you are on solid ground.

Early August

Borderline, and this is where the gamble lives. In the milder south and west, a fast early pea sown in the first week or two of August can just about crop in October before the weather turns. In the North and Scotland the odds are longer, because your first frosts arrive weeks earlier. It is worth trying if you have the space, but treat anything you harvest as a bonus rather than a certainty.

Late August and Beyond

For a crop of pods this year, yes, this is realistically too late almost everywhere. There simply are not enough warm growing days left for the plants to flower and fill pods before the cold stops them. But there is one clever exception worth knowing about, covered below: a late sowing of a hardy round-seeded variety made now can overwinter and give you the earliest crop of all next spring.

Why Late Peas Can Actually Do Better

Here is the part that surprises people. Peas are a cool-season crop. They dislike heat, and in a hot summer a spring-sown crop often struggles the moment the temperature climbs, growing poorly, suffering mildew, and giving tough, starchy pods. A late crop that does its main growing as the weather cools into September dodges all of that. The plants romp away in the mild, damp conditions they actually prefer, and the pods that form are sweet and tender rather than mealy.

So a late sowing is not just a desperate gamble on beating the frost, it is genuinely playing to the pea’s strengths. The one thing you are trading is time: you need the crop to mature before the cold, whereas in spring you have the whole summer ahead. Get a fast variety in early enough and you get the best of both, cool growing conditions and enough season to finish.

Choose a Fast Early Variety

For any late sowing, variety choice is what makes or breaks it. You want a first early, round-seeded pea, the quickest type there is, maturing in around eleven to twelve weeks rather than the fourteen-plus of a maincrop. Old reliable names like Feltham First, Meteor and Kelvedon Wonder are exactly the sort to reach for, bred to be fast and hardy. Avoid the tall maincrop and marrowfat types now, as they simply take too long. A packet of quick early pea seed costs very little, which is part of why a late gamble is so worth taking: the downside is a couple of pounds and a bit of space, the upside is fresh October peas.

Those same hardy round-seeded earlies are the ones to use for the overwintering trick. Sown in late October or November in a sheltered, well-drained spot, they sit through winter as small sturdy plants and race away in early spring to give you peas weeks before anything spring-sown. It is the one late sowing that is not a gamble at all, just a different plan.

Giving a Late Sowing Its Best Chance

A few things tilt the odds in your favour when you are sowing late. Sow into moist soil and keep it watered, because late summer ground can be dry and peas need consistent moisture to germinate and swell their pods. Get supports in early, as even dwarf peas crop better with a few twiggy sticks or netting to climb. And protect the young shoots from birds and mice, which are the two great enemies of pea seedlings, with a bit of netting or some twiggy cover.

Most usefully of all, have some horticultural fleece to hand for the autumn. Thrown over the row on the first cold nights, it buys you a week or two of extra growing time and can be the difference between filled pods and a near miss. In a cold-frame or against a warm south-facing wall, a late crop does even better. Every little bit of warmth you can steal at the back end of the season counts when you are racing the frost.

If It Really Is Too Late, Sow This Instead

If you have reached late August in a colder part of the country and a pea crop this year looks unlikely, do not leave the ground bare. Late summer is prime time for fast salads and hardy leaves that will crop through autumn, so a row of the things that genuinely thrive now is a better use of the space. There is a full rundown in what to sow in August and what to sow in September.

And peas are far from the only crop people ask about at this time of year. The full picture of what can and cannot still go in is set out in the main guide to whether it is too late to plant vegetables, which covers every common crop at a glance. Beans are the closest relative worth checking, since runner beans and french beans follow slightly different late-season rules.

The Full Picture on Growing Peas

Whether you are gambling on a late crop or planning properly for next year, the wider detail on getting peas right is worth having. The best sowing windows through the whole year are laid out in when to plant peas, and peas sit alongside everything else in the vegetable planting calendar. If you are just getting started, the beginner’s guide and the general how to grow vegetables pages will set you up.

Peas are a forgiving, cheerful crop, and their willingness to grow well in the cool shoulders of the year is exactly what makes a late sowing worth trying. Whatever the calendar says, a spare row and a packet of fast earlies is rarely a wasted effort, and there are few nicer things in October than a handful of sweet peas you were told you had left too late to grow.

Is It Too Late to Plant Peas? Frequently Asked Questions

A Sensible Place to Start

If you are reading this in July or early August wondering whether to bother, my advice is simple: bother. Get hold of a packet of a fast first early pea, sow a short row into moist soil this week, and give it a fair go. The cost is trivial and the cool autumn conditions are on your side more than you would think.

If the calendar has slipped past mid August, switch tack. Either sow fast salads and hardy leaves now for an autumn harvest, or note down the overwintering pea trick for late autumn, which gives you the earliest peas of all next year. Whichever you choose, the ground need never sit empty, and peas will be back in the plan before you know it.

Is it too late to plant vegetables? In the UK, the honest answer for early August is: for some crops yes, but for plenty of others there is still time, and a surprising amount can go in now for an autumn or even winter harvest. The crops whose window has closed are the long-season, heat-loving ones like tomatoes, pumpkins and runner beans from seed. But fast crops like salad leaves, radishes, spring onions and turnips can still be sown, and hardy vegetables for autumn and winter are exactly right for now. The table below gives you a straight yes or no for the vegetables people most often ask about, so scroll down, find your crop, and you will know where you stand.

I have lost count of the number of times, over twenty-odd years growing on heavy Oxfordshire clay, that I have stood over a bare patch of ground in July or August wondering if there was any point sowing anything. The instinct is to think the growing year is over by midsummer. It is not. The sowing year has two halves, and the second one, the autumn and winter crops, is one that beginners almost always miss. So before you write the season off, let me talk you through what is genuinely too late, what is still worth a go, and what you should actually be sowing right now instead.

Is It Too Late to Plant Vegetables? The Quick Answer Table

This table is for early to mid August, the point in the season when most people start asking the question. Dates shift a little with your region and the weather, and everything is a week or two more generous in the mild South West and tighter in the North and Scotland. Where a crop is borderline, I have said so honestly rather than pretending.

The Crops That Really Have Missed the Boat

Let me be straight, because there is no kindness in pretending. If you are reading this in August, the heat-loving, long-season crops are done for the year from seed, and no amount of optimism will change it. Tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, sweetcorn, cucumbers and courgettes all need the entire summer to grow, flower, and ripen fruit, and there simply are not enough warm weeks left. A tomato seed sown now would still be a small green plant when the first frosts kill it.

The same goes for runner beans from seed and maincrop onions. If you already have established plants of any of these, that is completely different, keep looking after them and they will crop into autumn until the frost stops them. But starting them from scratch now is throwing seed away. The honest move is to note the right time in the vegetable planting calendar for next year, and turn your attention to what actually will grow.

What You Should Be Sowing Right Now Instead

Here is the part beginners miss, and it is genuinely cheering. Late summer is not the end of sowing, it is the start of the autumn and winter growing season, and there is a whole set of crops that positively prefer to go in now. Fast salad crops are the obvious win: lettuce, rocket, radishes, spring onions and turnips are all ready in a matter of weeks, and many of them grow better now than in the heat of high summer, when lettuce bolts and rocket runs to seed.

Then there are the hardy autumn and winter vegetables that are exactly on time: spinach, chard, oriental leaves like pak choi and mizuna, spring cabbage, and overwintering varieties that sit through the cold and crop early next year. This is also the moment for autumn-planting onion sets and garlic as September approaches. There is a full rundown in what to sow in August and what to sow in September, which are the two pages to bookmark right now.

The Borderline Crops Worth a Gamble

Some crops sit right on the edge in August, and whether they work depends on your region, the variety, and a bit of luck with the autumn. I am a great believer in the cheap gamble here: a packet of seed costs little, an empty bed earns nothing, so if you have the space it is worth a punt on the borderline crops even knowing they might not fully mature.

A quick early pea variety sown in early August can crop in October in the milder half of the country, though it is too late to plant tomatoes from seed by now, and there is a full guide to whether it is too late to plant peas where you are. Dwarf French beans, being faster than runners, are just about worth trying very early in the month down south. And second-cropping seed potatoes, a special late-planting type, go in now to give you fresh new potatoes at Christmas, which is one of the nicest tricks in the whole gardening year. In the North and Scotland these gambles are longer odds, so lean instead on the reliable fast salads and hardy leaves. A bit of horticultural fleece to hand extends every one of these windows by warming the soil and buying you a couple of extra weeks in autumn.

Where You Garden Changes the Answer

Every date on this page shifts with your location, and it matters more in late summer than at any other time, because you are racing the first frost. In the South West and the milder south, autumn arrives late and you have the most generous windows, so the borderline crops are genuinely worth trying. Across the Midlands, treat the dates here as written. In northern England and Scotland the first frost comes weeks earlier, so be stricter: stick to the fast, reliable crops and the hardy overwintering leaves, and do not gamble on anything that needs to mature before the cold.

The single most useful thing you can know here is your own average first frost date, because that is the finish line everything is running towards. It is worth checking against the UK frost dates by postcode, and remember a greenhouse, cold frame or even a cloche effectively moves you a zone south by keeping the frost off. Growing in pots and containers helps too, since you can move them somewhere sheltered as the nights draw in.

Why Late Sowing Is a Habit Worth Keeping

Once you get into the rhythm of it, you stop seeing August as the end of anything. The gardeners who harvest something in every month of the year are not doing anything clever, they are simply sowing hardy crops in late summer while everyone else assumes the season is over. A row of spinach, some winter salad leaves, spring cabbage and a few autumn-planted onions will give you fresh food right through the lean months when the shops are at their most expensive.

So the answer to “is it too late” is almost never a flat yes. It is too late for that particular crop, perhaps, but there is nearly always something you can sow instead. If you are just getting going, the beginner’s guide and the general how to grow vegetables pages will set you up, and the August gardening jobs list keeps you right on everything else that needs doing this month.

Is It Too Late to Plant Vegetables? Frequently Asked Questions

A Sensible Place to Start

If you have found this page in a bit of a panic that you have left it too late, take a breath, because you almost certainly have not. Pick two or three of the crops marked “No” in the table, a fast salad and a hardy leaf, and get them sown this week into warm, moist soil. They will be up within days and cropping within weeks, and you will have proved to yourself that the season is far from over.

Then get into the habit, every year, of treating late summer as a second sowing season rather than the end of the first. Bookmark the August and September sowing guides, keep a packet of fast salad seed and some fleece to hand, and you will find you are harvesting something fresh in months when most gardens are bare. That, more than any single crop, is the trick worth learning.

How to ripen green tomatoes, the quickest method is to pick them and put them in a bowl or paper bag with a ripe banana, somewhere warm and dark, and they will turn red in a week or two. On the plant, you speed things up by removing the lower leaves, pinching out the growing tip in late summer, and easing off the watering so the plant stops making new growth and puts its energy into the fruit it already has. Warmth is what actually does the work, not sunlight, which is the bit most people get wrong.

Every August I have the same conversation with someone over a fence: plants loaded with tomatoes, not one of them turning red, and a growing worry that the whole lot is going to waste. If your plants are only just going in, though, it may be too late to plant tomatoes at all this year. It is one of the most common questions I get, and the good news is that ripening is easy to nudge along once you understand what the plant is actually waiting for. After twenty years of growing them on heavy Oxfordshire clay, I have tried most of the tricks, and a few of them genuinely work while the rest are folklore.

Why Tomatoes Go Red: It Is Warmth, Not Sun

Here is the thing almost everyone gets wrong, myself included for years. Tomatoes do not need direct sunlight to ripen. They need warmth, and they need a gas called ethylene, which the fruit produces itself. Sunlight helps the plant grow and it warms the fruit, but a green tomato will ripen perfectly well in a dark drawer as long as it is warm enough.

The sweet spot is roughly 20 to 24C. Below about 10C ripening more or less stops, which is why the crop stalls as autumn cools. And here is the counter-intuitive part that catches people out in a hot summer: above about 30C the plant stops making lycopene, the pigment that turns tomatoes red, so in a heatwave your fruit can sit stubbornly green or turn a patchy yellowish orange. If that is happening to you, the plant is not sick, it is too hot, and there is nothing to do but wait for the weather to settle. The RHS covers the growing side in detail if you want the background.

Once you understand it is about warmth rather than light, every method below makes sense, because they are all just ways of keeping the fruit warm and surrounded by ethylene.

How to Ripen Green Tomatoes on the Vine

If the plant is healthy and there is still warmth left in the season, the best tomatoes are the ones you ripen on the plant. You just help it along. The single most effective thing is to stop the plant growing, because as long as it is putting out new leaves and flowers it is spending energy on growth rather than ripening. From early to mid August, pinch out the very top of each cordon plant two leaves above the highest truss you want to keep. This is called stopping, and it tells the plant the season is ending.

At the same time, strip off the lower leaves up to the first truss of fruit. This lets light and warm air get at the trusses and improves airflow, which also cuts the risk of disease. Keep removing any new side shoots too, the same way you would earlier in the season, which I cover in removing side shoots on tomatoes. Finally, ease back on watering. A plant that thinks a drought is coming panics slightly and throws its energy into ripening the fruit it has, so slightly drier is better than lush at this stage. Just do not let it wilt hard. There is more on getting that balance right in how often to water, and the wider late-summer care sits in how to care for tomato plants.

How to Ripen Tomatoes Indoors, Off the Vine

Sometimes waiting on the vine is not an option. The nights have turned, blight is threatening, or the season is simply over. When that happens, pick the green tomatoes and ripen them indoors, which works far better than most people expect once you know it is ethylene doing the job.

The classic method is a paper bag or a bowl with a ripe banana or apple, which pump out ethylene and set the tomatoes off. Keep them somewhere warm, around 18 to 21C, and out of direct sun, which can scald them. Check every couple of days and remove any that are ripening or, worse, going soft, because one rotting fruit will take the rest with it. A single layer in a cardboard box lined with newspaper works just as well as anything fancy. Wrapping individual fruits in newspaper slows them down if you want to spread the harvest out over weeks rather than have them all at once.

One tip worth knowing: only fruit that has reached full size and started to lighten from dark to pale green, or shown the first blush of colour, will ripen well indoors. A tiny hard dark-green tomato picked in September has not developed enough and will more likely shrivel than redden, so those are the ones for chutney.

Ripening a Whole Plant at the End of the Season

When frost is forecast and a plant is still covered in green fruit, do not pick them one by one. Lift the whole plant, roots and all, and hang it upside down somewhere warm and dry like a shed, a garage or a spare room. The fruit keeps drawing on the plant and ripens gradually over the following weeks, and you get a much better result than picking everything green in a panic.

If frost has not quite arrived but is close, you can also buy a week or two outdoors by covering the plants at night. A layer of garden fleece thrown over the row on cold nights holds enough warmth to keep ripening ticking along and protects the fruit from a light frost. Knowing when your first frost is likely helps you plan all of this, and the frost date checker gives a date for your postcode. Clearing the last of the tomatoes is one of the jobs I list in August gardening jobs, and it dovetails with what to sow in September as the beds start to clear.

How to Ripen Tomatoes Quickly

If you want the fastest result, the banana-in-a-paper-bag method is hard to beat. The confined space concentrates the ethylene from the banana around the tomatoes, and in real warmth they will often colour up in three to five days rather than the week to two weeks a bowl on the side takes. An apple does the same job if you have no banana.

What does not work is the internet advice you will see about ripening them on a sunny windowsill. It is the most common suggestion and one of the worst, because a windowsill cooks one side in direct sun while the fruit stays cool, and you end up with soft, unevenly coloured tomatoes with tough patches. Warm and shaded beats bright and hot every time. There is no genuine way to ripen a tomato overnight, whatever you read, but the paper bag is as close as it gets.

Why Your Tomatoes Might Not Be Ripening

If the fruit is simply refusing to turn red on the plant, it is usually one of a handful of causes, and none of them means the plant is beyond help. Cool weather is the most common in a British summer, since ripening slows below 10C and the plant is just waiting for warmth. A heatwave is the opposite problem, stalling the colour above 30C. Too much leafy growth is another, where the plant is busy growing rather than ripening, which is exactly what the stopping and leaf-stripping above fixes.

Overfeeding, especially with a high-nitrogen feed, pushes the same leafy growth at the expense of fruit, so switch to a high-potash tomato feed once fruit has set. And sometimes it is simply too late a crop, where plants that went in late are only fruiting as the light fades. If your plants are struggling in other ways as well, it is worth working through common tomato problems, and if they are flowering but not even setting fruit, that is a different issue covered in tomato plants not producing fruit. Yellowing leaves alongside slow ripening point to why tomato leaves turn yellow.

What to Do With the Green Ones That Never Turn

Every year there are stragglers, the small hard green tomatoes that were never going to ripen. Do not bin them. Green tomato chutney is one of the genuine pleasures of the end of the tomato season, and it turns a glut of unripe fruit into jars of something you will still be enjoying at Christmas. Fried green tomatoes are worth a go too if you have never tried them.

I have come to see the green ones not as a failure but as a second harvest, and it takes the anxiety out of that first frost warning. Whatever has not ripened becomes chutney, and nothing is wasted. The BBC Gardeners’ World tomato guide has more on end-of-season care if you want another view.

Getting Ahead of It Next Year

Half the ripening battle is won long before August, at planting time. The single biggest cause of a late, green-heavy crop is starting too late, so plants that go in on time have the whole warm season to fruit and ripen. My guide to when to plant tomatoes covers the timing, and growing tomatoes in the UK pulls the whole thing together.

Variety matters too. Cherry types like Sungold ripen far earlier and more reliably in our climate than big beefsteaks, which often run out of summer before they colour up. And a greenhouse changes everything, holding the warmth that ripens fruit and extending the season at both ends. If you are still getting seedlings established each spring, how to grow tomatoes and why tomato seedlings go leggy will help you raise stronger plants that fruit earlier. Outdoors, growing a blight-resistant variety also means you are less likely to be forced into picking everything green because blight has struck, which is a common reason people end up ripening indoors in the first place.

How to Ripen Green Tomatoes: Frequently Asked Questions

A Sensible Place to Start

If your tomatoes are green and you are not sure what to do, start with the simplest thing. Pick a few of the biggest, put them in a bowl with a ripe banana somewhere warm, and watch them turn over the next week. That one small experiment shows you it is warmth and ethylene doing the work, not sunshine, and once you trust that, the rest falls into place.

For the fruit still on the plant, stop it growing in August, strip the lower leaves, and let the season do its job. And when the first frost warning comes, do not panic-pick everything green. Ripen what you can indoors and turn the rest into chutney. Handled that way, the end of the tomato season stops being a race against the weather and becomes just another part of the harvest.

I spent my first few years at war with greenfly and my last fifteen more or less ignoring them, and the plants have never been better. What changed was noticing what happened when I did nothing. One June I gave up on a badly infested row of broad beans, too busy to deal with them, and came back ten days later to find the colonies crawling with ladybird larvae and the plants cropping perfectly well. That was the year I stopped spraying anything, and the greenfly have been someone else’s problem ever since.

Greenfly, Blackfly and What They Actually Are

Greenfly and blackfly are not different pests, they are different aphids, and there are hundreds of species in the UK. What they share is a way of life: they pierce soft plant tissue and drink the sap, breeding at a speed that is genuinely hard to believe. In warm weather females give birth to live young without needing to mate, and those young are themselves pregnant when born, which is how a handful of aphids becomes a solid colony in a week. Greenfly are the pale green ones you find on rose buds and shoot tips. Blackfly, properly the black bean aphid, are the sooty black clusters that smother the growing tips of broad beans in early summer, and they also hit runner beans, dahlias and nasturtiums. Woolly aphids are a different creature again, appearing as white fluffy patches on apple branches and woody stems.

How to Spot the Damage

Look at the softest, newest growth first, because that is where they always start: the tips of shoots, the undersides of young leaves, and flower buds just before they open. You will see dense clusters of small soft-bodied insects, often with winged individuals among them once the colony gets crowded. The signs that go with them are as telling as the aphids themselves. Leaves become sticky with honeydew, the sugary waste they excrete, which then grows a black film of sooty mould. New shoots curl, pucker and distort, and buds may fail to open properly. And you will often notice ants running up and down the stems, because ants farm aphids for that honeydew and will actively protect them from predators, so a stream of ants on a rose is a reliable sign of greenfly above.

What to Do About Them, Honestly

Start with your fingers. Running a colony between finger and thumb takes seconds and kills hundreds, and on roses and beans that is usually the whole job. A sharp jet of water from a hose knocks off most of what remains, and aphids that fall off rarely find their way back up. For a heavy infestation on a tough plant, a very weak solution of plain soap in water sprayed onto the colonies works by breaking down their outer coating, though use it sparingly and never in strong sun, because it can scorch soft leaves and it kills beneficial insects it lands on just as readily. Pinching out the top few inches of broad beans once the lower pods have set removes the blackfly and the tender growth they want in one go, and it is standard practice on any allotment worth the name. What I would not do is reach for a spray as a first resort. Most of what is sold to home gardeners is either ineffective, short-lived, or kills the ladybirds, hoverfly larvae and parasitic wasps that are your actual solution, which is how people end up with a worse infestation a fortnight later than the one they sprayed.

Let the Ladybirds Do It

The single most useful thing to understand about greenfly is the timing. Aphids wake up and breed earlier in the year than the things that eat them, which is why late May and June feel like an invasion. Give it two or three weeks and the predators catch up, at which point the colonies collapse fast. A single ladybird can eat fifty aphids a day, and its larvae, those odd little blue-grey alligator things with orange spots that people often mistake for pests and squash, eat far more. Hoverfly larvae are even better, and lacewings, earwigs, tiny parasitic wasps and blue tits all pile in too. Learn to recognise ladybird larvae and leave them alone, because killing them is the most common own goal in the garden. Planting flowers among the vegetables brings the predators in earlier and keeps them there, which is one of the practical arguments in bee friendly plants. Hoverflies in particular want open, simple flowers such as calendula, poached egg plant and single marigolds.

Greenfly on Roses

Roses get greenfly every single year and it is worth saying plainly that a rose covered in greenfly in June is not in danger. The damage is cosmetic on an established plant, some distorted buds and sticky leaves, and by July it is generally over. Squash what you can reach, hose the rest, and resist spraying, because roses are magnets for ladybirds precisely because they carry aphids, and a sprayed rose loses that population for the season. If the same rose is badly infested year after year, look at how soft the growth is, since heavy nitrogen feeding produces exactly the lush sappy shoots aphids prefer. Ease off the feed and you get fewer greenfly, the same principle that applies to soft growth on vegetables.

Blackfly on Broad Beans

This is the one aphid problem that genuinely needs action, because a heavy blackfly infestation on broad beans really does reduce the crop. The colonies target the soft growing tip, so the fix is to remove it. Once the plants have set four or five trusses of pods at the bottom, pinch out the top four inches or so, which takes away both the blackfly and the growth they are heading for, and pushes the plant into filling the pods it already has. Do it as a matter of routine in early summer rather than waiting for the blackfly to arrive. Autumn-sown beans usually escape the worst of it altogether because they are further ahead by the time the aphids appear, which is one of the quieter arguments for autumn sowing covered in how to grow broad beans. If a few colonies remain lower down the plant after pinching, squash them and leave the rest to the ladybirds.

Keeping Numbers Down Next Year

Prevention here is mostly about not creating the conditions aphids love. Go easy on high-nitrogen feeds, because soft sappy growth is what draws them in, and a plant fed steadily rather than pushed hard is noticeably less troubled. Water consistently, since stressed plants attract more pests, and inconsistent watering causes plenty of other problems besides, as covered in how often to water. Grow flowers among the vegetables to keep predators resident rather than visiting. Check plants weekly in May and June and squash the first small colonies before they become large ones, which is five minutes that saves an hour. And accept a background level of aphids as normal and even useful, because a garden with no aphids at all is a garden with no ladybirds either, and that is a worse position to be in when the next wave arrives.

Frequently Asked Questions

A Sensible Place to Start

Do the cheap things and wait. Squash the colonies you can see, hose down the rest, pinch the tops out of your broad beans once the bottom pods have set, and then leave it alone for a fortnight. Learn what a ladybird larva looks like so you stop killing your own allies. Ease off the nitrogen feed on anything that gets hit year after year, and put a few open flowers in among the vegetables so the predators are already living there when the aphids arrive. That is the entire strategy, it costs nothing, and it works better than anything in a bottle. The year I stopped fighting greenfly was the year I stopped having a greenfly problem.

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The first year I grew brassicas properly I did everything right except the one thing that mattered. Beautiful cabbages, well fed, well watered, and I stood back rather proud of them in late July. Ten days later I lifted a leaf and the underside was crawling. Not a few caterpillars, hundreds, and the plants were more hole than leaf. I had watched the pretty white butterflies flitting about the plot all month and thought nothing of it. That is the whole lesson of this article in one story: the butterfly you ignore in June is the ruined crop you find in August.

Which Butterfly, Which Caterpillar

Two species do nearly all the damage, and it helps to know them apart because they behave differently. The large white is the bigger butterfly, with bold black wing tips, and it lays clusters of yellow, skittle-shaped eggs on the undersides of leaves. Its caterpillars are yellow and grey-green with black blotches, hairy, and they feed in gangs out in the open, often stripping the outer leaves first. The small white is slightly smaller with less black on the wings, and it lays single eggs rather than clusters. Its caterpillars are velvety green, well camouflaged against the leaf, and they burrow into the heart of a cabbage where you cannot see them, which makes them the sneakier of the two. There is also the cabbage moth, whose brown caterpillars do the same job at night. In practice you treat all of them the same way, but the large white is the one you usually spot first because it is so much more obvious.

How to Tell Caterpillars Are the Problem

The damage is distinctive once you know it. You will see ragged holes eaten through the leaves, often starting at the edges and working in, and on a bad infestation only the tough leaf veins left behind, giving that skeletal look. Look for the caterpillars themselves on the undersides of leaves and tucked into the growing heart, and for scatterings of dark green or brown frass, which is a polite word for caterpillar droppings, on the lower leaves and around the plant. Above all, check the leaf undersides for the eggs before they even hatch: the large white lays neat clusters of upright yellow eggs, and finding and rubbing those off is ten seconds of work that saves you a hundred caterpillars later. If the holes are accompanied by silvery slime trails instead of frass, you are dealing with slugs and snails rather than caterpillars, which is a different problem with a different answer.

The Only Thing That Really Works: Netting Them Out

Prevention beats cure so completely with this pest that it is worth saying plainly: the single most effective thing you can do is stop the butterflies ever reaching the plants. A physical barrier of fine insect mesh, put over the brassicas from May and kept on through summer, means no eggs, no caterpillars, and no work beyond checking it now and then. Ordinary butterfly netting with a mesh around 7mm is enough to keep both cabbage whites out, and it is the one piece of kit I would not grow brassicas without after that first disastrous year. The two things that matter in using it: hold it clear of the foliage on hoops or canes, because a butterfly will happily lay through mesh that is resting on a leaf, and tuck the edges right down to the soil or weigh them with stones, because they will find any gap. A tunnel of netting over a bed of cabbages is not the prettiest thing on the plot, but it is the difference between whole leaves and lace.

What to Do If They Are Already Here

If the caterpillars have already arrived, and in a British summer they will find unprotected plants within weeks, the honest answer is hands and vigilance rather than a magic bottle. Go over the plants at least twice a week, more in warm weather, and check the undersides of leaves and deep into the hearts. Rub off any egg clusters, and pick off and squash or drop into soapy water every caterpillar you find. It is not glamorous but it genuinely works if you are consistent, because you are breaking the cycle before the next generation lays. On a heavy infestation, a strong jet of water knocks many off, and standing the outer leaves back to expose the caterpillars to birds helps too. The biological control Bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally occurring bacterium sold for caterpillar control, is the one genuinely effective treatment beyond hand-picking, though availability to UK amateurs varies, so check what is currently sold before relying on it. What does not work well is most general bug sprays, which struggle to reach caterpillars tucked into a cabbage heart and which also kill the ladybirds and hoverflies you want to keep.

Working With Nature Instead of Against It

You do not have to wage total war. Cabbage white caterpillars have plenty of natural enemies, and a garden that encourages them suffers less. Birds, especially in spring, eat huge numbers, so leaving some access rather than netting absolutely everything has a place. A tiny parasitic wasp, Cotesia glomerata, lays its eggs inside large white caterpillars, and those sickly caterpillars surrounded by little yellow cocoons are the wasp doing your job for you, so leave them be. Growing some flowers among the veg to bring in hoverflies and other predators helps the whole plot, which is one of the arguments in my piece on plants for pollinators. Some gardeners plant nasturtiums as a sacrificial crop that the whites lay on in preference, though in my experience that just breeds more butterflies unless you then remove the caterpillars, so treat it as a decoy you still have to police, not a fix.

Keeping Brassicas Healthy Enough to Cope

A strong plant shrugs off light damage that would set back a weak one, so good growing is part of pest control. Firm planting, steady moisture and sensible feeding all help, and the brassica cluster on this site covers each in turn: growing brassicas for the overview, feeding without soft growth, since soft sappy growth from too much nitrogen is exactly what pests love, and watering brassicas properly. Net the plants, keep them growing steadily, check them twice a week through summer, and you will eat the cabbages instead of watching the caterpillars eat them. It really does come down to those few habits, and the netting is the one that does most of the work.

Frequently Asked Questions

A Sensible Place to Start

If you grow brassicas, buy the netting before you need it, not after. Put it over the plants in May on hoops that hold it clear of the leaves, tuck the edges down to the soil, and you have solved the problem before it starts. If the caterpillars are already among your cabbages this summer, do not despair and do not bother with sprays: get into a rhythm of checking the leaf undersides twice a week, rubbing off the yellow eggs and picking off the caterpillars, and you will save the crop. It is ten minutes that feels like a chore and pays you back in whole, unlaced cabbages. I learned that the hard way, standing over a bed of skeletons one August, and I have never grown a brassica uncovered since. Getting the netting on early, right from when you plant your brassicas out, is what keeps them clean.

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September used to feel like the end of things to me, packing away rather than starting. It took an old boy on the Oxfordshire site I rented to put me right. He walked past my half-empty beds one September, looked at the bare soil, and said something to the effect that an empty bed in September is a wasted March. He was right, and the year I finally listened was the year I picked spinach and salad leaves in February while everyone else was waiting for spring. September is quietly one of the most productive sowing months there is, as long as you sow the right things.

Vegetables to Sow in September

The salad crops are the easy win. Winter lettuce varieties such as Winter Density and Arctic King, along with lamb’s lettuce, rocket, mizuna, mustards and other oriental leaves, all sow happily in early September and crop through autumn, then again in early spring after a winter pause. Under a cloche or in a cold greenhouse they will keep going most of the winter. Spinach and chard sown now give you leaves in October and a heavy flush the following March. Spring onions of a hardy variety like White Lisbon Winter Hardy sit through the cold and are ready long before spring-sown ones. Radishes sown early in the month still crop in four to six weeks, and winter varieties like Mooli or China Rose sow now for pulling later. Turnips sown early September give small tender roots and useful greens. If you are not sure which varieties suit a September sowing, the vegetables to sow in September list is a useful cross-check before you order.

Two more worth knowing. Spring cabbage sown in the first half of September, then planted out in October, is the classic hungry-gap crop and one of the most satisfying things in the garden, because it grows quietly all winter and gives you greens in April when nothing else is ready. And pea shoots or hardy varieties like Meteor sown in a sheltered spot can overwinter for a very early crop, though I would be honest and say this works better in the south than the north. Timing matters more than usual in September: the first half of the month is worth far more than the last, because the soil is still warm and the light is still decent. A sowing on the 5th of September is a different proposition from the same seed sown on the 25th.

What to Plant Out in September

Planting is as important as sowing this month. Towards the end of September, garlic can go in, and garlic genuinely needs a cold period to split into cloves properly, so autumn planting gives far better bulbs than spring. Autumn onion sets go in from late September into October for a harvest weeks ahead of spring-planted ones. Overwintering broad beans like Aquadulce Claudia can be sown from late September in milder areas, though October and early November are the more usual window and honestly the safer bet in the north. Strawberry runners planted now establish through autumn and crop properly next summer rather than sulking, which is why September planting beats spring. Full detail on each in when to plant garlic, when to plant onions, how to grow broad beans and when to plant strawberries.

Flowers to Sow in September

Hardy annuals sown in September flower weeks earlier and grow noticeably stronger than the same seed sown next spring, because they make root through autumn and are ready to romp away in March. Calendula, cornflower, larkspur, ammi, nigella and poppies all suit an autumn sowing, either direct into cleared ground or in modules to plant out later. Sweet peas sown in September and overwintered in a cold frame or unheated greenhouse are a genuine step up on spring-sown plants, with longer stems and earlier flowers. September is also the month for spring bulbs: daffodils, crocus and alliums all go in now, with tulips the exception, better left until November when the soil is colder. If you are sowing a wildflower patch, autumn suits native perennial mixes because many need a cold spell before they will germinate.

September Lawn Jobs

September is the best month of the entire year for lawn work, better than spring, and most people miss it. The soil is still warm enough for fast germination but the weather is damper and cooler, so new grass establishes without the drought stress of a spring sowing. If you are sowing a new lawn or over-seeding bare patches, now is the moment. It is also the right time to scarify out the thatch, spike or aerate compacted areas, top dress with a sandy loam mix, and apply an autumn lawn feed, which is high in potash and phosphates rather than the nitrogen of a spring feed, to toughen the grass for winter instead of pushing soft growth. Do this once in September and the lawn will look better next May than any amount of spring fussing will achieve.

Other Garden Jobs Worth Doing This Month

Beyond sowing, September is about setting up next year. Clear finished crops as they come out rather than leaving beds to weed over, and either sow a green manure such as field beans, rye or phacelia, or mulch the bare soil with compost. Green manure is the underrated one: it holds nutrients that would otherwise wash out over winter, protects the soil surface from heavy rain, and gets dug in or cut down in spring. If you garden no dig, a thick autumn compost mulch does the same job and the worms do the work for you over winter. Now is also the ideal moment for improving your soil, because anything added in autumn has all winter to break down. Elsewhere: lift and dry onions and maincrop potatoes, cut down and clear any blighted foliage, order garlic and autumn onion sets before the popular varieties sell out, bring in tender herbs, and start collecting leaves for leaf mould as they fall.

The Honest Limits of September

It is worth being straight about what will not work, because optimistic sowing in September wastes seed and confidence. Anything tender is finished: no more courgettes, beans, sweetcorn, cucumbers or squash. Carrots and beetroot sown now will not amount to much outdoors, whatever the packet implies. Most brassicas other than spring cabbage are too late. And there is a real north-south split this month that generic advice tends to ignore: a September sowing in Cornwall and the same sowing in Aberdeenshire are not remotely the same gamble, and gardens in the north or at altitude should treat the first half of September as the whole month. If you are unsure whether something is worth trying, check it against the UK vegetable planting calendar, and when in doubt sow into modules or under cover rather than open ground, because a cloche is worth about three weeks of season.

Frequently Asked Questions

A Sensible Place to Start

If you do nothing else this month, do three things in the first fortnight. Sow a row of winter-hardy salad leaves and a row of spinach, because they cost pennies and they will feed you when the shops are charging a fortune for a bag of leaves. Order your garlic and autumn onion sets now rather than in October, since the good varieties sell out. And do not leave a bed bare: either mulch it with compost or sow a green manure, because bare soil over a British winter loses nutrients and grows weeds. That is an afternoon’s work. The old boy on my site was right, and the March I first understood it was the March I stopped buying salad.

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The August my tomatoes went black, the potatoes two beds along went the same way about four days later, which is how I learned the hard way that they are the same disease. I made every mistake available. I dithered for a week hoping it would pass, then dug the lot up in a panic while the soil was still covered in spores, and half of what I stored turned to brown slime in the sack by October. Nothing teaches you the right sequence quite like opening a sack of rotten potatoes in a cold shed. This guide is that sequence, in the order it actually needs doing.

What Potato Blight Is and Why It Spreads So Fast

Potato blight, or late blight, is caused by Phytophthora infestans, a fungus-like organism rather than a true fungus, which is why many ordinary garden fungicides do nothing against it. It is the same organism that causes tomato blight, and it moves freely between the two crops, which is why keeping them apart matters. It is also the disease behind the Irish potato famine, which tells you something about how destructive it can be when conditions suit it. Spores blow in on the wind, land on wet foliage, and germinate in warm humid weather. Two consecutive days of minimum temperatures above 10C with long spells of high humidity is the classic trigger, conditions a British summer produces reliably from July onwards. Once infection starts in a damp crop, it can go from a few spots to a collapsed bed in under a week.

How to Recognise Potato Blight

It starts on the leaves as dark brown or blackish patches, often at the leaf tips and edges first, frequently with a pale yellowish-green halo around them. In humid weather, look at the undersides of affected leaves in the morning and you may see a faint white fuzzy growth, which is the organism sporulating. From there it moves fast: whole leaves brown and shrivel, dark streaks appear on the stems, and the plant takes on a scorched look, as though someone has gone over it with a blowtorch. There is often a distinctive musty, rotten smell to a badly affected bed on a still day.

Below ground, infected tubers develop sunken dark patches on the skin, and cutting one open shows a reddish-brown rusty marbling spreading in from the surface. Blighted tubers frequently go on to develop soft, foul-smelling secondary rots in storage, which is where most of the damage is actually done. Do not confuse blight with the ordinary yellowing and dying back of haulms at the end of the season, which is simply the crop finishing, or with the slower spotting of early blight, a different and far less serious disease. Blight is fast and it stinks. If in doubt, look for how quickly it is spreading, because that is the tell.

What to Do the Moment You See It

Act the same day. Cut every bit of foliage and stem off at ground level, and do not leave the cuttings lying on the bed. Bag them and put them in the household waste or take them to the tip. Do not compost blighted haulms, because a garden heap does not get hot enough to reliably kill the spores, which is worth remembering even if you are otherwise keen on composting at home. Removing the foliage stops the disease travelling down the stems into the tubers, and that is the whole point of doing it quickly.

Then leave the tubers in the ground. This is the part people get wrong, myself included that first year. Spores from the dead foliage are sitting on the soil surface, and if you dig immediately you drag your potatoes up through them and infect the crop on its way out. Wait two to three weeks. The spores on the surface die off, the skins on the tubers set firmer, and what you lift then is far more likely to store. When you do dig, do it on a dry day, leave the potatoes on the surface for a few hours to dry, and inspect every single one. Store only clean, firm, unmarked tubers, because one infected potato will rot an entire sack. Anything with a sunken dark patch gets eaten straight away if sound inside, or binned.

The Truth About Spraying

For years UK gardeners protected potatoes with copper-based or mancozeb sprays applied before infection. Those products are no longer available to amateur gardeners here, and in any case they were preventatives that had to be on the leaves before spores arrived, never cures for an infected plant. Commercial growers still spray, on a schedule, with products and equipment not sold to home gardeners. So if you are searching for a potato blight treatment or the best fungicide for blight, the honest answer for a UK home garden is that there is not one worth buying. Home remedies do not work against this organism either. That is not a counsel of despair, because the cultural methods below genuinely do work, but it does mean the money is better spent on the right seed potatoes than on a bottle of anything.

The Early Potato Escape Route

The most reliable defence in a British garden is timing, not chemistry. Blight arrives from mid-July onwards in most years. First earlies planted in March are ready to lift from late June, which means the crop is out of the ground and in the kitchen before the disease turns up at all. In twenty years I have almost never lost a first early to blight, and I have lost plenty of maincrops. Second earlies mostly get away with it too. Maincrops are the vulnerable ones, sitting in the ground through August and September precisely when conditions favour the disease. So if blight is a recurring problem on your plot, the simplest fix is to grow more earlies and fewer maincrops, which is worth thinking about when you order your seed potatoes in winter. My guide to when to plant potatoes covers the timings for each type.

Blight Resistant Varieties

If you want maincrop potatoes and you garden somewhere wet, resistant varieties are the real answer. The standouts by a distance are the Sarpo family, bred in Hungary and trialled in Wales: Sarpo Mira and Sarpo Axona have the strongest late blight resistance available to gardeners, scoring top marks in commercial evaluations, with the bonus of drought tolerance and vigorous foliage that smothers weeds. They are floury maincrops, excellent for mash, chips and baking, and they store for a long time. Cara, Valor and Setanta also carry useful resistance without being quite in the same class. Availability moves around between suppliers and seasons, so check who has them when seed potato stock lands from around December, and order early because the resistant varieties sell out first in a year following a bad blight summer.

One honest caveat, the same one that applies to tomatoes: the blight organism keeps evolving, and new strains have already eroded the resistance of some older varieties. Resistance is a very strong advantage rather than a permanent guarantee. Pair it with the habits below and you have covered everything a gardener realistically can.

Reducing the Risk Next Year

A few practical habits make a real difference. Earth up generously, because a deep covering of soil stops spores washing down from the foliage onto the tubers, and shallow-covered potatoes are the ones that rot. Space plants properly so air moves through and foliage dries quickly after rain, and water the soil rather than the leaves. Keep potatoes and tomatoes well apart, and never plant either where blighted potatoes grew the previous year. Clear every last tuber at harvest, because the disease overwinters mainly in living potatoes left in the ground, and next spring those volunteers come up carrying it. Rotate where you grow them, and never plant supermarket potatoes or your own saved tubers from a blighted crop, since certified seed is the one place not to economise. Get all this right and you will still lose the odd year to a filthy August, but you will keep cropping when others do not. More on the basics in how to grow potatoes and common potato problems.

Frequently Asked Questions

A Sensible Place to Start

If blight has just hit your potatoes, do three things today: cut the foliage off at ground level, bag it and bin it, and then leave the tubers alone for a fortnight. That sequence saves more crops than anything else in this guide, and it is exactly what I failed to do the year I lost half a sack to rot in storage. Then plan next year around timing rather than treatment: more first earlies lifted in June, a resistant maincrop like Sarpo Mira if you want potatoes for storing, generous earthing up, and not a single tuber left in the ground at harvest. Blight is a weather disease and some summers will beat you whatever you do, but those few decisions turn it from a disaster into an inconvenience.

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I planted my first proper bee border for entirely selfish reasons. My courgettes kept setting one fruit and then dropping the next three, and someone at the allotment told me bluntly that I did not have a courgette problem, I had a pollinator problem. So I put in a scruffy strip of borage, catmint and marigolds along the sunny end of the plot, mostly to shut him up. The following summer the courgettes went berserk, the beans set properly for the first time, and I stood there one August afternoon listening to that whole strip humming. It is the single best return I have ever had from three quid of seed.

Why This Matters More If You Grow Vegetables

Pollinator planting gets talked about as a wildlife good deed, and it is one, but for anyone growing food it is straightforwardly practical. Courgettes, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, beans, strawberries, raspberries, apples and plums all crop better, or in some cases only crop at all, when insects move pollen for them. If you have ever had plants that flower but produce no crop, poor pollination is one of the usual suspects, especially in a cold or wet summer when insects are not flying much. A garden full of bees is a garden with heavier trusses and fuller beds. The flowers pay for themselves in vegetables.

The Four Rules That Matter More Than the Plant List

Before any shopping list, get the principles right, because they do more work than any single plant choice. First, flower across the whole season. Bees are on the wing from February to November in a mild year, and most gardens are a feast in June and a desert in March and October. Filling those two gaps helps more than adding another summer flower. Second, choose single, open flowers. Double-flowered varieties, the frilly many-petalled dahlias, roses and bedding, have often been bred until the nectar is gone or buried where no bee can reach it. If you cannot see the middle of the flower, neither can a bee. Third, mix native and non-native. RHS research found the total number of flowers matters more than their origin, with a bias toward natives and other northern hemisphere plants and a few exotics to extend the season. Fourth, never spray anything in flower, and ideally do not spray at all. Insecticides kill the pollinators you are trying to attract, and even some products sold as natural are harmful to bees.

The Plants That Actually Work

For the main season, my shortlist after twenty years is boringly reliable: lavender, which is smothered in bumblebees from June, borage, which self-seeds cheerfully and which honeybees adore, catmint, hardy geraniums, foxgloves for the long-tongued bumblebees, and single-flowered marigolds and cosmos to keep going until the frosts. Herbs are the unsung heroes here: let a few plants of thyme, oregano, chives and mint flower rather than cutting them all back, and they will out-perform most bedding for insect traffic. That is a genuinely free win, since you are already growing them, and it is one of the arguments I make in growing herbs.

The gaps matter more than the middle. For late winter and early spring, when queen bumblebees emerge starving and there is almost nothing out, plant hellebores, pulmonaria, crocus and grape hyacinth, and leave the dandelions alone, because they are one of the most valuable early nectar sources there is. For autumn, sedum (now Hylotelephium), Michaelmas daisies, single dahlias and above all ivy, which flowers in October when nearly everything else has finished and which is worth its weight in gold to late bees. For butterflies specifically, buddleja earns its reputation, but pair it with marjoram, verbena bonariensis, knapweed and a patch of nettles left in a corner, because several of our prettiest butterflies can only lay their eggs on nettles. A butterfly garden with no caterpillar food is a service station without a kitchen.

Wildflower Seed: The Cheapest Way to Start

If you want the biggest change for the least money and effort, sow wildflowers. A single packet scattered across a sunny strip does more for pollinators than a trolley of bedding plants, and it costs a fraction as much. Wildflower seed mixes come as annual mixes, which flower spectacularly in their first summer and want re-sowing, and perennial or native meadow mixes, which take a year to get going but then return. My advice for a first attempt is an annual mix along a border edge or in a spare bed, because the instant results keep you interested, then add a perennial patch once you have seen what a difference it makes.

Two honest warnings, because wildflower patches fail more often than the packet pictures suggest. They need poor soil and full sun: sow a meadow mix into rich, well-fed vegetable ground and the grasses and vigorous weeds will swamp the flowers within weeks. Strip the turf, rake to bare soil, do not add compost, and resist feeding it. And clear the ground properly first, because scattering seed onto existing grass almost never works, which is the single most common reason people conclude wildflowers are not for them. If you are going meadow rather than border, sow yellow rattle with it, a semi-parasitic native that weakens grasses and lets the flowers compete. Autumn or early spring sowing both work; autumn suits perennial natives better.

Everything That Is Not a Plant

Planting is most of the job but not all of it. Give bees water: a shallow saucer with pebbles or gravel to stand on, topped up and refreshed, saves a surprising number of exhausted insects, and they do drown in open water without a landing spot. Leave a patch of bare, sunny soil undisturbed, because most of our 270-odd UK bee species are solitary and many nest in the ground rather than in hives. Mow less, and let clover, dandelions and self-heal flower in part of the lawn, which is the laziest and most effective thing on this entire list. Leave stems and seedheads standing over winter instead of tidying everything in autumn, since they shelter overwintering insects, and a no dig approach helps too by leaving the soil and everything living in it undisturbed. Bee hotels are fine and fun with children, but keep them small, dry and cleaned between years, because a neglected one turns into a disease trap and does more harm than good.

A Realistic First Year

You do not need to redesign the garden. In year one, pick a sunny two-metre strip you are not using and sow an annual wildflower mix in spring. Put in one lavender and one catmint somewhere warm. Let a few herbs flower instead of cutting them all. Buy a handful of crocus and hellebores in autumn to cover the spring gap. Stop spraying, put out a pebble saucer, and mow one corner of the lawn less often. That is a weekend of work and perhaps twenty pounds, and by the following July you will notice the difference standing still with your eyes shut, which is exactly how I first noticed mine. The vegetables noticed sooner than I did.

Frequently Asked Questions

A Sensible Place to Start

Start with the strip and the season, not the shopping list. Clear a sunny patch of bare soil, sow an annual wildflower mix in it, and plant one lavender nearby. Then look honestly at what your garden offers in March and in October, and fill those two gaps with crocus, hellebores, sedum and ivy. Let some herbs flower, leave the dandelions in one corner of the lawn, put out a saucer of water with pebbles in it, and stop spraying. Everything else on this page is refinement. Do those few things and the garden will sound different by next summer, and if you grow vegetables, it will feed you better too.

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I lost an entire outdoor row to blight one August in Oxfordshire, the kind of wet muggy August we get every few years, and it happened so fast I genuinely thought someone had poured weedkiller over the bed. One evening the plants were fine, three days later they were black and stinking. That row taught me more than any success ever did, and almost everything I now do with tomatoes, from where I plant them to which varieties I choose, traces back to that week. So this is not a cheerful guide, but it is an honest one, and the honest version is the one that saves your crop.

What Tomato Blight Actually Is

Tomato blight is late blight, caused by a fungus-like organism called Phytophthora infestans, the same organism responsible for potato blight and, historically, the Irish potato famine. It is not strictly a fungus, which matters because it means many ordinary fungicides do nothing against it. The spores blow in on the wind and thrive in exactly the conditions a British summer serves up on repeat: warm days, cool nights, high humidity and wet foliage. Outdoor tomatoes are hit hardest because rain lands on the leaves and the wind carries the spores straight in. Greenhouse plants are much safer, simply because the spores struggle to reach them, though an open door or vent on a muggy day can still let blight in.

How to Tell If It Is Actually Blight

Half the plants people declare dead from blight have something far less serious, so before you pull anything up, look properly. Blight has a distinct signature. It starts as irregular brown or grey-green watery patches on the leaves, often with a paler yellowish halo around the edge, and it spreads fast, in days not weeks. In humid weather you may see a faint white fuzzy growth on the undersides of affected leaves, which is the organism itself sporing up. From the leaves it moves to the stems, leaving dark brown or black streaks, and finally to the fruit, which develops firm brown leathery patches, usually starting on the shoulders where spores land from above. The overall impression, and this is the tell every experienced grower recognises, is of a plant that looks scorched, as though it has been hit by frost or a blowtorch.

What it is often confused with matters just as much. Blossom end rot is a sunken brown patch on the bottom of the fruit only, with no leaf damage, and it is a watering and calcium problem, not a disease. Simple leaf yellowing from the bottom up is usually feeding or watering, covered in my guide to caring for tomato plants. Early blight, despite the shared name, is a different and much slower disease showing as brown spots with concentric rings like a target, and it rarely destroys a plant the way late blight does. If the damage is slow and patchy, you probably do not have late blight. If it is fast and spreading and the plant looks scorched, you do.

Early Blight and Late Blight Are Not the Same Thing

This trips people up constantly, so it is worth being clear. Late blight is the fast, plant-killing disease this article is mostly about, the Phytophthora one. Early blight is caused by a completely different organism, Alternaria, and shows as dark spots with a bullseye pattern of concentric rings, usually on the older lower leaves first. Early blight is a nuisance that reduces vigour and can be managed by removing affected leaves, improving airflow and keeping the plant well fed. Late blight is the emergency. If your searches keep turning up American advice about spraying for blight, bear in mind much of it addresses early blight, which behaves differently, and that the fungicides they name are often not available to UK home gardeners anyway.

What to Do the Moment You See Late Blight

Speed is everything, because you are no longer trying to cure the plant, you are trying to save the crop and protect everything nearby. First, if you have caught it very early on just one or two leaves, remove them immediately, bag them and bin them, do not compost them. Sometimes, in a dry spell that follows, that buys you time. More often the weather stays muggy and it spreads regardless.

Once it is into the stems, accept the plant is finished and act decisively. Cut off and harvest every fruit that is still firm and unblemished, even the green ones, because green tomatoes ripen perfectly well indoors on a windowsill or in a drawer with a banana, and they make excellent chutney besides. Then pull up the whole plant, roots and all, bag it and put it in the household waste or take it to the tip. Do not compost blighted material and do not leave it lying on the plot, because it sheds spores onto everything around it. Wash your hands and tools before touching healthy plants. The goal at this stage is containment: one blighted plant dealt with fast is a disappointment, a whole bed left to rot is a disaster that seeds next year’s trouble too.

The Truth About Sprays and Cures

This is the section people least want to read and most need to. There is no home garden spray in the UK that cures late blight once a plant is infected. The old copper-based preventative sprays that gardeners used for decades are no longer available to amateurs here, and even those were preventatives, applied before infection to slow it, never cures. So when you search for a tomato blight cure or the best fungicide for blight and find products promising miracles, treat them with deep suspicion, because the science is simply not on their side for late blight. Home remedies like milk sprays, bicarbonate and the rest may help very slightly against some other tomato problems, but they will not stop late blight. Anyone selling you a cure is selling you hope, not results. The honest defence is not a bottle, it is everything in the next two sections.

How to Stop Blight Getting a Foothold

Since you cannot cure it, prevention is the whole game, and a few habits genuinely cut your risk. Grow under cover if you can: a greenhouse, polytunnel or even a simple rain cover over outdoor plants keeps the leaves dry and the spores off, and dry leaves are the single biggest factor. Water the soil at the base, never the foliage, and water in the morning so any splashes dry quickly, the same discipline that helps with most tomato troubles, covered in how often to water. Space plants generously and remove lower leaves so air moves freely and the canopy dries fast after rain. Keep tomatoes and potatoes well apart, since blight jumps between them, and never plant tomatoes where blighted potatoes grew the year before. And keep plants strong with steady feeding, because a vigorous plant shrugs off a light early hit far better than a stressed one, which is where good tomato growing from the start pays off.

The One Thing That Actually Works: Resistant Varieties

After that August wipeout, the change that made the real difference was not a spray or a clever trick, it was switching varieties. Modern blight-resistant tomatoes have been bred specifically to withstand late blight, and while no variety is completely immune, a good resistant one will often sail through a wet summer that flattens the old favourites beside it. The standout for UK gardeners is Crimson Crush, an F1 variety bred for genuine blight resistance that still produces large, properly flavoured tomatoes rather than the tough tasteless fruit that early resistant varieties gave you. Others worth knowing are Mountain Magic and the cherry variety Lizzano. If you garden outdoors in a wet part of the country, or you have been burned by blight before, a resistant variety is the best decision you can make. Thompson and Morgan stock Crimson Crush and other resistant varieties as both seeds and young plants, and it is the one seed choice I would not compromise on after what I have seen blight do.

One honest caveat: the blight organism is always evolving, and a variety that resists today’s strains may meet a new one in future, so resistance is a strong advantage rather than a cast-iron guarantee. Combine a resistant variety with the good habits above, and you have done everything a gardener realistically can.

Blight in the Soil and Next Year

A common worry is that blight lurks in the soil ready to strike again, but late blight does not generally survive winter in UK garden soil on its own. It overwinters mainly in living plant material, most often infected potato tubers left in the ground, which is why clearing every last potato at harvest matters. So you do not need to sterilise your soil or abandon the bed. What you should do is practise good potato hygiene, rotate where you grow tomatoes and potatoes, clear all debris at the end of the season, and start next year with resistant varieties and dry-leaf discipline. Blight is a weather disease as much as anything, so some summers will always be worse than others, but a gardener who does these things will keep cropping tomatoes through years that leave their neighbours with black stalks.

Frequently Asked Questions

A Sensible Place to Start

If blight has just hit you, do not waste money on a cure that does not exist. Harvest every firm tomato to ripen indoors, pull and bin the infected plants fast, and keep your tools and hands clean around what is left. Then make next year different: grow a resistant variety like Crimson Crush, keep the leaves dry by watering at the base and giving plants room to breathe, and keep your tomatoes clear of the potato patch. Blight is a genuinely hard disease and some wet summers will test you whatever you do, but these few decisions are the difference between the odd lost plant and a black, empty bed. After that August of mine, I have rarely lost more than a plant or two, and never a whole crop again.