Get Your Garden Ready For Winter
Golden light and warm days, cool nights and early frosts, autumn is still a beautiful time of year. A lot of people think of spring as the start of the gardening year, but for me it is now. Everything I do now will impact on how the garden looks next year, so I move plants, reduce those that have got too big, or divide and increase the ones that I want to spread about. I plant bulbs, make changes and plan ahead.
As leaves fall I rake them off the lawn so they don’t spoil the grass and sweep them off paths. Nothing goes to waste and I spread them on the woodland border. Heaped under shrubs and trees, leaves make homes for hedgehogs and other creatures over winter. I’ve made a temporary netting cover for my new pond trough (shared with you in an August issue of My Weekly). This stops leaves falling in the water that would otherwise stagnate.
I prune back buddleias and roses by a third. In spring I’ll prune them further but for now it will stop the wind knocking them over. It’s a good time to plant bare-rooted wallflowers, cheap to buy in bundles from nurseries. They make a wonderful combination with tulips. And you can plant containers with winter flowering pansies, pale colours showing up best in winter light.
I don’t enjoy sorting out the greenhouse but it needs doing and it’s better to clean the glass before winter for maximum light. So I choose a rainy day and take the radio with me! Tender plants will be protected here as well as terracotta pots that might shatter in frost. I risk leaving dahlias in the ground because our soil is very free draining; some have survived four winters now!
By the end of autumn, the garden looks tidy enough but still has plenty of hiding places for wildlife. It’s a good balance – attractive for us to look at and kind to wildlife too.