Sarah Raven's Kitchen and Garden

I’ve just had an argument with a gardening friend about the late sowing of half-hardy annuals. He was adamant that in this country, even in the South, you can’t sow any of these semi-tender plants - zinnias, cosmos, snapdragons, love-lies-bleeding and especially tomatoes after the beginning of May and hope to get a crop. There’s no way they’d reach flowering or fruiting size.

I promise you he’s so wrong. I know I live in Sussex and growing conditions are easier in the autumn than they are elsewhere, but if you live in a fair sized town with its own warmer microclimate, or have a garden with well-drained soil in a sheltered spot, even in the North, your growing season is probably longer than you think. Our autumn climate is changing. I remember Guy Fawkes Day as a child – exciting, but in mild pain with freezing hands - whereas in some recent years, it has been almost warm enough to take a picnic.

As a result of chaos in the garden a few years ago, I didn’t get round to doing most of my sowing until the end of May. It’s true that July and half of August was rather flower and tomato poor, but once we hit late summer, the garden and greenhouse were fantastic. I am usually away for much of July and August, so this suited me fine and the other great bonus was that the cutting garden and bedding areas of annuals through the oast and dahlia garden, were jam-packed full of verve and vigour right the way through the autumn. When everyone else’s garden was turning to a mix of grey and brown, I was still picking plenty of flowers in the middle of November and harvesting trugs of tomatoes from the greenhouse.

So now I do a late sowing on purpose. I don’t bother with the long-and naturally late-flowering annual plants like cleomes, Nicotiana sylvestris and Salvia patens and the durable foliage varieties like Perilla frutescens and Moluccella laevis (Bells of Ireland). These are all long-lasting, exceptional performers, looking good from a March or April sowing to the end of autumn without much dead-heading or TLC.

The ones I re-do are the varieties that tend to look pretty scraggy by mid September when they’ve been spring sown. I re-do the lovely green, Zinnia ‘Envy’, and sumptuous, tall, deep-crimson Zinnia ‘Cactus red’. All my favourite snapdragons go in again – the velvety, crimson-black and white, Antirrhinum ‘Night and Day’, and pure crimson,A. ‘Liberty Crimson’, as well as the surprisingly fragrant A. ‘Giant White’. The snapdragons tend to become infected with rust as they get tired after three or four months of flowering and yet they’re the hardiest of all the plants I’ve mentioned. By sowing again in May, and planting out my seedlings in a sheltered spot, I have a pristine and productive crop almost up to Christmas.

Nicotiana ‘Lime Green’ doesn’t last as well as other varieties of the tobacco family and I’m going to sow this for a second time, along with the other invaluable autumn green, Amaranthus caudatus ‘Viridis’. By September its soft chenille cascading tassels turn a strange pink-green on the spring sown plants. I prefer its faded acid-green tones of a younger plant. This love-lies-bleeding is so easy to grow, its well worth putting in another packet in the next couple of weeks.

I’ve tried doing cucumbers, chillies and aubergines late, but they don’t do so well. They need a good long growing seasons – nineteen or twenty weeks – to produce a decent crop. With certain tomatoes, the tasty early ‘Oregon Spring’ and easy ripening, cherry tomato varieties ‘Gardener’s Delight’ and ‘Sungold’, it’s a different story. ‘Sungold’ anyway crops long and hard and if you’re lucky, your March sown seed will continue producing until mid October, but in our family, cherry tomatoes are top favourites and I often end up – rather ashamedly – buying them after that. With plants sown now, of any of these three varieties, you can add six weeks to this potential cropping time.

If I was on a freely drained soil, I’d sow the zinnias and amaranthus straight into the garden. On my heavy clay, this doesn’t always work well, so I’m sowing all of my May seeds into trays, sitting outside on a length of capillary matting. This holds water well and so I don’t have to be ever-attentive with the hose. On a hot day at this time of year, the polytunnel or greenhouse gets too hot and plants burn. They’re better outside, with a plastic sheet chucked over them in heavy rain.

The snapdragons and amaranthus have tiny seed, so these are going into conventional seed trays, sown as thinly as I can. I can then plant them out straight from there, but the rest will go into some great new containers I’ve discovered, with the pot and contents both made from coir, for planting out together. We’ve been experimenting with these with some of our spring sowing and they were a great success, with the outer pot shell disintegrating quickly when it’s planted in damp soil. No pricking out, no potting on, no root disturbance and no peat - easy-peasy autumn gardens full of colour!