Getting the garden ready for winter

It did make me chuckle this week when I received a gardening email suggesting it’s time to ease up in the garden as the number of jobs to be done reduces. That’s definitely not the case here! As well as trying to get the garden ready for winter, we have a long list of improvements to make that we simply don’t have the time to do during the summer. This week however we’ve been focusing on our winter prep job list with the hope of starting some of the improvements next weekend.

The mild temperatures and intermittent sun and rain have caused the grass to keep growing at a fairly fast rate. Great news around the farmhouse where John scarified and top dressed the lawns a few weeks as they’re now looking thick and green, and he hasn’t had to spend time watering the seed in. Mowing all the lawns takes about a day in total but it’s time well spent – it looks much neater and it’s far easier to rake the leaves when the grass is short. I managed to harvest some more windfall this week in the orchard before John mowed there, raking up leaves and adding more to the hedgehog house there before bagging up a bag for leaf mulch. We planted daffodils around more of the fruit trees – we’ve been gradually planting a few each year in an attempt to attract pollinators in the early spring when the trees are in blossom.

In the kitchen garden we’ve started tidying up the beds, although many are still full of vegetables to be harvested. We took down the sunflowers and have hung the heads in the greenhouse to dry out so we can harvest the seeds for next year. And we pruned the gooseberry plants and the soft fruit bushes in the fruit cage. Raspberry canes have popped up in various places near the fruit cage so we dug those out and replanted some of them in the raspberry patch. It already looks much neater.

The new table for our chilli greenhouse arrived this week so we built and installed that, and moved the rest of our chilli (and a few random aubergine) plants down from the main greenhouse so they’re all in one place. We gave them the same treatment as last week’s plants to remove the aphids and signs of mould – as these are much smaller plants though I’m hoping they survive. 24hrs in a warm greenhouse and they seem to have perked up a little…

As most of our dahlias have stopped flowering we’ve started to dig them up and dry out the tubers ready to be put away. The greenhouse is now full of tubers – lucky we moved the chilli plants yesterday to make space! Eventually they’ll go into the garage until spring.

And we emptied the cold frame of the remaining plants and weeded it. The painted window frames don’t like the winter weather very much so this year we’ve bought a tarpaulin to try and protect it. Now it just needs to not blow away!