IT’S been a difficult year for fruit and veg with the cold weather in spring, incessant summer rain and subsequent deluge of slugs, snails, blight and other nuisances.

But for those of us who haven’t suffered from poor pollination of fruit crops, tomato and potato blight and slug-infested greens, now is the time to think about how you are going to store what you have.

Temperatures are dropping and tender veg need to be encouraged to ripen before the first frosts.

Anyone with unripe tomatoes shouldn’t delay in removing leaves from the bases of plants to let in more sunlight to the fruits.

They will need harvesting before the first frosts and should continue to ripen indoors if you pick them now. Cut whole trusses of green tomatoes and hang them in an airy place such as a garage or spare bedroom.

Long-keeper varieties such as the Spanish De Colgar ripen slowly after harvesting if kept in a cool, frost-free place and can take three months to reach maturity.

Maincrop potatoes should be harvested on warm, sunny days and left to dry out in the sun, after which they can be stored in thick paper sacks and kept in the dark in a frost-free place.

First early and second early varieties generally don’t store well, so use these as quickly as you can.

Maincrops, however, should store until after Christmas and possibly into March.

Bend the leaves of onions and shallots over at the neck and once they turn brown, pull the plants up but leave the bulbs on the ground to continue to dry off.

After about a week, lay them in trays or put them into nets to hang up in the shed. Alternatively, you can make French onion strings (and do the same with shallots and garlic) by keeping as much of the straw-like foliage on them as possible and plaiting it together, reinforcing the strands with hessian twine to make it stronger.

Varieties of early apples generally don’t keep so they need to be eaten shortly after picking, but later varieties will keep in the salad compartment in your fridge for between four to six weeks. Alternatively, they can be placed in wooden boxes lined with newspaper, in a cool, airy shed.

You can wrap stored apples individually in newspaper to ensure they never touch each other and so prevent one bad apple infecting the whole crop. Apples and pears kept in this way should last for six weeks or more and maybe even until Christmas.