NOVEMBER GARDENING Harvesting salad vegetables
Harvesting the salad garden should have begun by now.
Keep up a regular schedule of new plantings of lettuces, spring onions, radishes and rocket to keep the salad bowl filled.
Get in a sowing of sugar snap peas in the first week of November to give you a Christmas harvest. These have the shortest maturity of all the peas and will be the only ones ready by Christmas. The fresh young leaves are a sweet addition to salads.
Wait until early November before sowing corn or butter beans. Erratic germination and slow growth result from sowing before the soil is consistently warm. Corn is a very nitrogen-hungry crop so prepare the soil with a good product, like Daltons Organic compost, Yates Dynamic Lifter or sheep pellets to ensure healthy fast growing plants.
Dress all zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes with a little of these products when planting to get a good headstart.
Mulch your strawberry crop with straw to keep moisture in and fruit clean. Side dressing with a little strawberry fruit food is good if you haven’t already fed them. Get your netting sorted, as the birds are best informed as to when the berries are ready. Flower garden
Get annuals such as petunias and other summer colour varieties planted now before the garden dries out. Bare soil grows weeds.
Mulch again and ensure there is a thick carpet of pea straw to help retain moisture in rose beds and around other perennials to keep competing weeds away.
Keep up a routine of spraying Yates Super Shield on roses and Conqueror on others to kill aphids and their friends fortnightly, until the heat of summer slows the insect growth down.
Spray lawns with Turfix to kill weeds and prickles before the lawn hardens off for summer. Weeds grow faster than grass so give a raggedy look to a lawn and lead to more mowing.
Side dress all fruiting trees and bushes with Novatec or Nitrophoska Blue to ensure a balanced feed supply when the load comes on as they are burdened with fruit. Slow releasing both products feed for three or four months getting the trees and bushes through the fruiting period.
Get swan plants in. Monarch butterflies wont be far away now.
Any pots left vacant when bulbs have died down can be spruced up with some of the new petunia varieties. Done in early November, these will be at their best in the run-up to Christmas.