Impressed by the Japanese Black Trifele tomatoes

• There is not a whole lot you can be doing in the ornamental garden at this time of the year but history tells us that we will start cooling off within the next fortnight so enjoy the respite. Try at least to stop summer weeds from seeding to reduce next year’s crop. Snip the seed heads straight into a bucket and dispose of in the rubbish or burn them if you are in an area that allows fires.

• It is pretty much the last call for summer pruning of cherry trees. While you are about it, you may want to tidy up plums and peaches as they finish cropping.

• Mark has tried a relatively large assortment of tomato varieties this year but top of the popularity poll is Japanese Black Trifele. It is a curious dark tomato, more deep green and black than red so traditionalists may find it slightly disturbing but it more than makes up for that with good flavour, fleshy texture (rather than too juicy) and good production.

• You can save seed from most vegetables (we will be saving the tomato seed), confident that future crops will come true but with two provisos. Save the seed from the best specimen in the harvest, not some poor little weakling. The quality of future crops depends on the quality of the parent plant. And F1 hybrids will give very patchy results and don’t generally come true to the parent. F1 hybrid seed is the result of controlled pollination between two selected parents and was the origin of the super sweet corn we now take for granted and of some of the modern tomato cultivars. The only way of telling if you have F1 hybrids growing is from the original seed packet.

• Keep up the deadheading on summer flowering plants like dahlias and cosmos to extend the blooming season.

• Deadhead agapanthus by waterways and near native bush areas.

• Get the winter veg into the ground but plant brassicas in small numbers successively every month to avoid the common problem of a huge surplus of cabbages and cauliflowers all coming ready at the same time.