THIS is a busy but rewarding time of year in the vegetable garden.

Continue with the harvesting of all vegetable crops and keep up with the picking of runner beans to maintain cropping well into the autumn. Continue with the lifting of potatoes.

Prepare to lift onions towards the end of the month. Wait until the tops begin to fall over as this indicates that the bulb has stopped swelling. Dry them before ‘stringing’ and putting into store. These bulbs will then keep until next March.

Start to thin apples and pears down to one or two fruits per cluster. The apples and pears will soon begin to colour up.

Harvest soft fruit. The late fruiting raspberries will be cropping well by now.

Make the last of any outdoor sowings to provide a late harvest for this season. Radishes and lettuce, for example, will still produce a crop.

The end of this month signals the time to begin summer pruning your apples and pears, grown as cordons, espaliers or fans. The purpose of summer pruning is to encourage the development of fruit buds for next summer.

Trim any box hedging before the first of the frosts arrives. Remember the addage: “Make the first cut after the last frost and the last cut before the first frost.”

Blossom end rot can affect tomatoes, causing black sunken blotches on the skin of the fruit. Usually due to a lack of calcium, the disease can be stemmed by amending your watering habits to ensure the calcium found in the soil is fed through the water to the plant – so water regularly and don’t allow the soil to dry out. And don‘t forget to discard any damaged fruit.