What's good in August

And the child-like thrill with which we cracked the first pea pod and devoured a row of tiny green peas has given way to the glutton's nonchalance. Instead of continuing to savour these little miracles, we have begun stomping about the garden, cursing the thigh-sized marrows that were meant to be courgettes and the rusty broad bean pods now fat enough to serve as sleeping bags for plump field mice. "What the hell am I supposed to do with all this stuff?" we ask. But we shouldn't whinge. This is the kind of problem that half the world dreams of. So we must avoid these negative vibrations and get on top of our crop without delay. Make the harvest daily, of at least three different kinds of vegetable, and try to ring the changes. Pick double quantities - one for dinner and one for the freezer.

Don't despair at the cannonball peas with whitening, wrinkled pods - suckling babes turned OAPs in a matter of weeks. Don't scorn the overgrown lettuces either, even if they have almost gone to seed. Put these two together and even in old age they are, with the support of a trusty old onion, still capable of romance. Pea and lettuce soup is as much a pleasure to defrost and heat up for a warming winter supper as it is to chill down and sip at on a stifling August evening. And more crudely, a coarse pea purée, with a bit of ham or bacon, makes one of my all-time favourite suppers.

There will be casualties. I thought my romanesco cauliflower was meant to be an autumn staple, but much of it had bolted by mid August. It is certainly a little easier to forgive yourself for squandering such richness if you keep a couple of pigs. Last July, August and September our pigs ate almost as well as we did. The first of the three went to slaughter in mid August for a spit-roast - the centrepiece of a memorable camping weekend for our friends and Oscar's. Before she died, she feasted on the pods of our almost-daily crop of peas and broad beans. I think it was the finest roast pork I have ever tasted, and I credit the high-summer vegetable garden diet as much as the wood fire and the spit.

There's certainly a lot to get your head around this month. Last year potatoes and tomatoes seemed to occupy more than their fair share of my gardening brain. The gardener has a love-hate relationship with these two, and August is often the month where both emotions are most intensely felt. Throughout July they seem like the most vigorous and indestructible of plants. But a few musty days in August can release the spores of blight that weaken them fatally. Here in Dorset, potato blight seems to be not an occasional disease but an annual inevitability, earlier and worse in some years than others. Blight management is the name of the game. I'll share my understanding of it with you because I only really got the hang of it last year. When the first browning starts to appear on the leaves of one plant, you can kid yourself it's just a little scarring or scorching. When it begins to spread to the surrounding plants at a steady and even rate, you know what's happening. But there's no need to panic. There is a merciful lag between the infection of leaves by airborne spores and the blighting and rotting of the tubers below. Even as the green leaves wither and die, the potatoes will continue to thrive and grow. But you really don't want to miss the crossing point. As soon as the majority of plants in a given row (some varieties will succumb faster than others) are showing more withered and brown leaves than fresh and green ones, you should cut down the whole row, just an inch or two above the ground. Drastic, I know, but the idea is to kill off the blight before it infects and rots the tubers. Remove all the cut foliage from the area. You can compost it, but it should be buried under a thick layer of existing compost or grass cuttings.

You should then leave the potatoes in the ground, harvesting as you need them, for at least ten days but no more than 20 (fewer if the ground is wet). In this time frame any residual blight spores should die off, yet the tubers in the ground will not have time to rot. Whatever is left must then be lifted and stored. Lift on a dry day if you can, and leave the tubers for a few hours on the surface. If the weather thwarts you, transfer them to a warm kitchen on newspaper. The point is that they are best stored ‘dirty but dry' - in wooden or cardboard boxes, covered, in a cool place. Exclude from storage any potatoes that are cut, damaged or infected in any way (use these up in the kitchen instead).

Tomato blight is less inevitable. Indeed, look after your plants well and with a bit of luck you may never be troubled by it. But when the blight comes, it is faster and more devastating than when it hits the potatoes. I'm afraid I messed up again last summer, for the second time in four years. Delighted with my new polytunnel, I was greedy for a heavy crop, and keen to try a whole bunch of new varieties, too. I grew a ridiculous number of plants in pots from seed, and although I gave a lot away I still tried to cram in too many and I planted them out, I now realise, far too close together. Had I been more ruthless with my pinching out and stripping, I might have got away with it. Instead I revelled in the rude health and magnificent foliage of my tomato plants throughout May, June and July, and was delighted to see so many flowers, which quickly turned into trusses of embryonic fruit. July was humid and often windless. My Dad, a very successful tomato grower, came to see us one weekend and was appalled by the scenes of lushness in the polytunnel - pride waiting for a fall. We did a radical panic prune, reducing the foliage on the vines by about half. The discarded matter included, to my dismay, quite a lot of flowering and fruiting stems. But even such harsh measures proved too little too late. By the first week in August, blight was appearing on the leaves before a single fruit had even started to colour. And by the time the first tomatoes were ripe a couple of weeks later, much of the green fruit was already scarred with brown blighting.

In such circumstances, an exercise in cutting one's losses is all that is left to try. You can delay the inevitable, and give a few more tomatoes the chance to ripen before they succumb, by stripping all the foliage (yes, every single leaf and stem that isn't a fruit-bearing vine) off all the plants. You can also do a massive pick of your biggest, unblighted green tomatoes and derive some comfort from a huge batch of chutney. We did both these things, and managed to salvage enough of a crop for our immediate gratification. In the end we ate most of our tomatoes as fresh fruit, in August. By the middle of September it was all over, and we'd probably only been able to harvest a third of our potential crop. There's no luscious tomato purée in the freezer this winter. Lesson learned. Next year I'm going to be super-cautious Mr Conscientious tomato grower. Am I capable of such discipline? Marie points out that I've already acquired about 20 different varieties of tomato seeds for the coming year. Get a grip, Hugh, get a grip...

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