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Tips and jobs

Sow broad beans
It may be the end of the old season – but that means it's also the start of the new! Broad beans are first off the mark: sown now they overwinter as seedlings and produce fat, tender pods up to a month earlier than those sown in spring. Choose an ultra-hardy variety like 'Aquadulce Claudia' and protect seeds from mice with a mulch of holly prunings.

Harvest the rest of this year's crops
You can leave bone-hardy winter veg like savoy cabbages, kale and Brussels sprouts where they are, but bring root veg in for the winter away from slugs, frost and waterlogging. Dig up carrots, beetroot, swedes and celeriac and pack in wooden boxes in damp (but not wet) sand, where they'll keep for months.

Ripen green tomatoes
It's now a race against time to turn those stubbornly green stragglers on your tomato plants to at least a faint shade of orange before frost turns them to mush. Cut plants from supports, lay them on straw on the greenhouse floor and cover with polythene cloches to double the heat. If frost is imminent, pick any that are still green and store with ripe bananas, and if that doesn't work, dust off that recipe for green tomato chutney.

Top tips

Join the Heritage Seed Library to widen your horizons and try some new veg while keeping our oldest traditional varieties alive. Garden Organic members get to choose up to six new veg to try each year.

Grow mushrooms in those damp, shady bits of the garden where nothing else thrives. Cut a log and stud it with dowels soaked in the spores of shiitake or oyster mushrooms and you'll be harvesting them for years.

Leave a messy corner for wildlife to hibernate in and you'll have a ready-installed pest destruction service in spring. Logs or stones in corners, or bundles of bamboo canes protect toads, hedgehogs and bees through the cold.

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